


nothing is (but what is not?)

by layersofsilence



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (prior to start of story), Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Canon-Typical Violence, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Stucky Big Bang 2017, Temporary Character Death, but u can def see its influence so: credit where credit is due, don't fuck the bees, i say loosely it was meant to be an AU but then it kind of. spiraled, is probably closest, loosely inspired by mission: impossible - rogue nation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 16:46:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 40,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11855664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/layersofsilence/pseuds/layersofsilence
Summary: Three years after his best friend (his lover, hisBucky) had been killed in action, Steve receives word that he’s alive. But seeking men back from the dead has consequences, it seems, and in his search Steve finds himself at the centre of an ever-widening conspiracy that’s slowly revealing itself to involve everything he thought he knew.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> the incredibly talented [thunderboltsortofapenny](http://thunderboltsortofapenny.tumblr.com) made a wonderful playlist for this fic!! listen to it [right here](https://open.spotify.com/user/thunderboltsortofapenny88/playlist/1LfGeNUhnQAUAI5jW0hoSM)

LOCATION: UNIDENTIFIED GODFORSAKEN MOUNTAINSIDE  
SOMEWHERE IN THE ALPS, PROBABLY GERMANY

The Alps, as Clint has pointed out at least seventeen times since their arrival, are _cold as fuck_. Inexplicably to Steve, this seems to surprise Clint, even though the Alps are a well-known winter holiday destination.

Still: for the eighteenth time, Clint’s voice can be heard through the comms.

“I’m fucking frozen, what the fuck,” he whines. “My _balls_.”

Steve can’t help but think that there’s something pure in how Clint goes all out when he complains. Steve himself has been sitting on the same pile of slowly melting slush for half an hour, his back resting against one of the motionless wheels of the plane he’s meant to be breaking into, and hasn’t said a word. It doesn’t mean that he disapproves; on the contrary, it’s a relief to hear someone else complain. It really is fucking cold, and financial strain or not, better winter gear is a much-needed investment on SHIELD’s part.

“Hawkeye,” Coulson says. Steve startles at the new noise and winces as his knees land on fresher, colder snow. When Clint doesn’t reply, Coulson repeats, “Hawkeye, do you copy?”

“Of course I fucking copy, I just said I was frozen,” Clint hisses. “What did you think that was, some kind of automatic message?”

“We’ve confirmed that the bombs are on the plane,” Coulson says, and Steve thinks longingly of the presumably warm base in which the team’s commanding officer is located.

“No shit,” Clint hisses. “We’re formulating Plan B.”

“What we?” Steve asks. “I haven’t heard anything about a plan B, I’ve just been sitting here while the plane does nothing.”

“Fine, _I’m_ formulating plan B,” Clint says. This mission was supposed to have been an easy one, in and out of the plane before it could even turn its engines on, something that could demonstrate how effective SHIELD was to an ominously looming Oversight committee. Somewhere along the line their information had gone wrong, and instead of the light aircraft they’d been expecting it was a much larger industrial plane sitting on the snow, with the sort of security Steve would expect to see on a bank vault. For a group they’d flagged as being low-level insurgents, they were remarkably well financed and equipped. And just to make things worse, for an organisation that’s meant to deal with global threats, SHIELD has spent the last few years being slowly strangled of their funds. They’re remarkably terribly financed right now, hence the substandard winter gear and muddle information.

“What is plan B?” Coulson asks. His words drag slightly, in a way that suggests he doesn’t quite want the answer to his own question.

“Getting at the security remotely,” Clint says, oozing false confidence in a terrible attempt to get the plan past Coulson.

“How?” Steve demands, at the same time that Coulson asks “ _How_ can you get at it remotely?” He sounds more suspicious than ever, but Clint’s attempts at false confidence do that to a person.

“ _Well_ ,” Clint says forcefully, like this will distract from the rest of his statement, “Tony hacked me into this Russian satellite.”

There is a shocked pause, and then Coulson says, “I _cannot_ authorise that.” Clint cackles openly at the horrified tone, and Steve can’t help but snort.

“Good thing we didn’t ask permission, then,” Clint says.

“SHIELD is _already under investigation_ for _numerous_ counts of misconduct -” Coulson starts, like this isn’t something every agent at SHIELD has been hearing for months.

“A minute ago the bombs were on the plane and that was all you cared about!” Clint points out. “Listen, the plane should be accessible now -”

The rest of his sentence is drowned out when the plane shudders to life above Steve. The previously-stationary wheel at Steve’s back vibrates with the force of the engine, and scatters snow over his lap.

“I read a heat bloom,” Coulson informs them.

“Engines have started,” Steve confirms as he stands up and brushes himself off. He has to half-shout to be heard over the noise of the engine. “Hawkeye, you said it was accessible?”

“Yep!” Clint yells.

Steve only manages to get himself below the door before the plane starts to move. Of course it has to have an impressively quick acceleration time, and Steve has to speed right the fuck up to keep himself in any sort of useful position. It’s like an early morning run, he tries to rationalise, except the air is so cold it feels like fucking knives in his lungs.

“Um, it’s reaching the end of the rock,” Clint says. “You’ve got like - twenty metres left? Fifteen!”

“Don’t do a countdown, oh my god,” Steve huffs out as he runs. Clint mutters something about super-soldiers being stupidly fit, but Steve tunes him out in favour of panicking as the plane gets closer to takeoff speed and position. “Can you open the door remotely?” Steve manages to yell. 

He has to break from his running form to reach up and press his comm deeper into his ear, because it’s the only way he’s ever going to catch the, “Yeah!” Clint shouts back and the, “Three...two...one!” he follows it up with.

“Do it!” Steve yells. It’s technically unnecessary, since the countdown probably means Clint is on board with the plan, but Steve needs to yell something while he makes what is possibly one of the dumbest impulse decisions of his entire life, which is to launch himself after the plane. Thankfully, he manages to grab onto some sort of bar above the back door. Less thankfully, he is in the air, at an increasingly high altitude, with no viable way of getting down. The snow-covered mountains look less and less hospitable to landings with every moment, and even a super-soldier’s body has to have some kind of limit to the force it can withstand.

“What the fuck!” Clint squawks, which is pretty much what Steve wants to say, as well.

“The door!” Steve yells, hoping that the words can be heard through the loud wind.

“Hawkeye, open the door!” Coulson calls. He actually raises his voice, and Steve can hear the exclamation mark.

“Right! Right, yes, sure -” Clint yells back, and then the back door opens and Steve manages to maneuver himself into the cabin. It feels like the muscles in his arms are screeching at him, and the wind basically flings him into the cabin wall after a point, but he’ll take bruises over a fall, and gladly.

“Done!” Clint yells through the channel, even though he has no reason to be shouting anymore. “St - Cap, did you get in? _Cap_?”

“I’m in,” Steve pants into his earpiece from where the wind threw him against the plane wall. Somehow he’s not bleeding, but he can feel the onset of what promise to be some pretty impressive bruises. “I see the bombs. They’re labelled for major cities around the world. And Canberra.”

“Where’s that?” Clint asks, oblivious to Steve’s attempt at humour. “Also, can I get picked up now? I was serious about my balls freezing off.”

“Is there any way to disable the bombs?” Coulson asks. Steve regards the bombs in front of him suspiciously, and they remain stubbornly as they are, smooth and slightly old-fashioned, strapped almost unnecessarily tightly into shelves.

“Not that I can see,” he confesses eventually. “But I don’t think they’re going anywhere soon.” Whoever had packed the bombs probably deserves some sort of health and safety award.

“Alright,” Coulson says. “Commandeer the plane, get back down to the ground, collect Hawkeye, and fly back here.”

“Can’t I skip the collecting Hawkeye part?” Steve asks, mostly so that he can use Clint’s indignant “ _Hey!_ ” from over the comms as a distraction from the protestations of his muscles as he pulls himself to his feet. “Protocol for the pilots?”

“As little violence as possible,” Coulson replies, as per their usual exchange.

“Understood,” Steve replies, and wastes no time in heading into the cockpit. From his understanding of what he overhears as he steals closer, the pilots seem to be engaged in an argument over which unfortunate soul is going to leave the cockpit, where the temperature is at least tolerable, to check on the malfunctioning doors in the back, where the temperature is not at all tolerable, something Steve is willing to attest to.

Steve has the element of surprise, and the three men are trapped in a tiny enclosed space with a door that swings inwards; the fight was never going to be overly long, or indeed long at all. One of them is knocked out cold from the impact of the door being kicked open, and the other two only manage to stand up before Steve punches them with enough force that they slump bonelessly.

He catches them both as they fall and places them in their previous chairs, not necessarily because he cares overly much about their wellbeing but because he’s not willing to risk an unconscious head piloting the plane into a mountainside. Clint and Tony would never let him live that down.

“Control of the plane has been acquired,” he reports.

“Oh good,” Clint interjects, before Coulson can reply. “Is it warm in there?”

“No,” Steve says. He can almost hear Clint’s responding pout.

“Not even in the cockpit?”

“It was warm in the cockpit,” Steve concedes. “I kicked the door open.”

“You’re the worst,” Clint says. “On the upside, you can probably market this as an example of quick thinking and improvisation to Oversight, yeah?”

“Congratulations,” Coulson says. Steve’s not sure whether Coulson doesn’t know or doesn’t care, but the way he pinches his nose in frustration has an effect on his voice, and it can be heard now. “Please return to headquarters in the plane as soon as possible, and land _gently_.”

~*~

LOCATION: ‘THE VINYL FRONTIER’ RECORD STORE  
EVENING, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

Steve had managed to finagle three scant hours of fitful sleep on the flight back to New York headquarters, because however good his eye for long-range weapons is, Steve has little to no faith in Clint’s piloting skills. It’s been the only rest he’d gotten since the mission had begun, which is long enough that Steve has forgotten the number of hours he’s spent awake.

Upon his arrival back at base Coulson had debriefed him and sent him back out on the follow-up mission so fast that Steve’s head is still spinning. Then again, that could be the sleep deprivation.

“This cannot be legal,” he’d said at the end of the debrief.

“We are _under investigation_ ,” Coulson had said for the fifth time. “We need _results_.”

Which is how Steve finds himself in his current position: nestled firmly behind the last shelf in a record store in the name of covert observation. SHIELD had released the three insurgent-pilots almost immediately, since the last-minute changes to their schedule and the equipment they’d been carrying makes it fairly clear that they’re lackeys. A follow-up mission is standard in this situation, to observe and assess if and who they report to. It should feel routine, even mundane, but in the quiet of the record store and with the three men muttering increasingly nervously among themselves, it starts to feel more sinister.

“We’re closing up soon,” the girl behind the counter says. Steve’s watch informs him helpfully that ‘soon’ is in four minutes, if the sign out front is to be believed.

“Sure, yeah,” one of the guys replies.

“We’ll be quick,” another promises, he himself too quick to try and reassure her and only serving to heighten the strange tension that’s filtering through the room.

There’s a pause, and then she says, “Can I help you find anything?”

“No,” two of the men snap, while the other one blurts out, “Jazz.”

“Our jazz section is just a shelf to the right,” the girl says pleasantly. She doesn’t seem to want to interact with the men, and the three of them in turn seem to be waiting for someone else. Steve can hear feet tap and the buzzing noise of a zip being played with as they continue pretending to browse.

If the shop assistant isn’t their contact, she runs the risk of being collateral damage, and Steve can feel an unpleasant crawling up his spine at the thought. There’s no viable way to warn her to leave now without giving up the hiding spot he’d so carefully snuck into, but that doesn’t stop Steve from mentally running through every possible path of action he can think of.

“Listen, I’m sorry, but we close at six,” the girl says apologetically. The guys murmur incoherent responses in short tones, and Steve is willing to bet that the poor girl is on the receiving end of a few nasty glares.

Steve’s position offers him a view of the street, and one man in particular catches his eye, partly because this is the third time he’s walked past the shop in five minutes and partly because the frown on his face is impressively furrowed. Steve could swear that something about his face is familiar. Just after his third walk-by he spins on his heel and heads straight for the door of the shop.

“I swear to _fucking god_ ,” he snarls as he opens the door, “you fucks are the fucking _dumbest shits_ -”

“You said to meet you here!” one of the braver guys protests. Steve sneaks around his shelf to an alcove in the wall and presses himself into the space.

“At _six_ ,” the dark-haired guy snarls.

“So we were early! That’s a good thing!”

“Six is when this dump fucking closes, dipshits,” a new voice snaps. Steve wants to smack his forehead, partly because these men are idiots and partly because he hadn’t noticed the owner of the new voice - a woman, from the sound of it - come into the shop.

“Um,” the girl behind the counter says timidly, and there’s a gunshot. The echo of it seems far too loud in the sudden silence. Steve has to close his eyes against the sound of it, and the subsequent telling thump of a body against the ground. He should have warned her. He could have, if he’d revealed himself at the same time.

His own gun rests in a concealed holster at his waist, and now seems as good a time as any to get it out.

“Was that necessary,” the woman says, voice flat. She seems to be coming closer to Steve’s alcove, and he flees his position in favour of flattening himself on the ground and crawling through an open doorway into a small room where a large record player nestled into a corn which takes up most of the available space. He can’t help but catch a glimpse of blonde hair and blood as he turns the corner before it disappears again.

“You know it was,” the guy snaps, and the woman does not rebut this, although her movements become louder. There’s a window above Steve’s crouched figure, and because he can’t raise his head all he can see is the speckled white ceiling, slightly water-stained and grey in some areas. 

“Jesus, how long does it take you to case a fuckin’ room?” the angry guy growls. “I could’ve done it twice by now.” Steve can’t quite help but to bristle at the condescension in his voice, even though it’s utterly ridiculous to be offended by workplace sexism in what is nearly definitely a terrorist organisation.

“Go right the fuck ahead,” the woman snaps back. Her voice is close, too close, but before Steve can do anything more than put his finger on the trigger of his gun the door is kicked even further open than it already is. The woman presumably casing the place steps into the room, and of course she sees him right away, he’s not small and the room is and there’s a distinct lack of hiding places to take advantage of.

He only has time to take her in briefly - red hair, slim figure, combat-ready clothes and a small gun in her hands- before she launches herself towards him, eyes narrow. Steve shoots once but misses, and then he can only roll out of the way, cursing the window for having kept him in a crouched position. He has to get up, now, but it’s going to mean the woman has more time to attack.

“What the fuck?” Steve hears her companion say, and then fucking four other men pile into the tiny room and the place turns into a mess of flailing limbs and shouts. Steve’s good, but so is the woman, and the group only seems interested in shoving him against the nearest wall, not killing him, so Steve lets himself stop fighting and watch as the room settles again. The stark fluorescent bulb chooses that moment to flicker, with an eerie sense of timing.

Steve wants to hear what they have to say, since they don’t immediately try to kill him, but as soon as the dark-haired guy asks, “Who’re you?” that desire flies out the window and he’s hard-pressed to keep his eyes from rolling.

“You’re not meant to start out with that question,” Steve says bitchily, to annoy him. Judging from the way his eyes narrow, it words. “You’re meant to work up to it.” He _swears_ he’s seen the guy somewhere before, and then the woman says something in Russian and he turns his head to look at her so he’s in profile and something just - clicks, at that, because Steve has seen his profile before, when he was declared missing in action.

“You’re staring at me,” the guy says, when he turns back to face Steve and finds Steve’s eyes on him.

“Because I know your face, Rumlow,” he says, this time pulling out the bitchy stops and hoping that it comes off as a past realisation instead of something that’d struck him two seconds ago.

“You know who I am,” Rumlow says. He folds his arms and waits, either perfectly comfortable or doing a very good job pretending. The three men also in the room are not so composed; two of them had outright started when Steve had said Rumlow’s name, and one of them is still fidgeting.

“Brock Rumlow,” Steve says. “Codename Crossbones. You used to work for SHIELD.” The search-and-rescue op that’d been launched when he went missing had been Steve’s second field mission. Rumlow and the red-headed woman do not react to the statement, but the other three men are clearly uneasy. Consciously or unconsciously, their heads duck away from Steve, as if he’d have reason to recognise them. It raises an interesting point about their previous lines of work, and Steve files that away for later.

“Funny thing is,” Steve continues, like nobody had reacted, “you were officially declared MIA three years ago.” 

“Funny sense of humour you’ve got there,” Rumlow says with a smirk. And in an instant his demeanour changes from amused to grim and he lunges forward to plant a solid punch on Steve’s ribs. Steve lets himself wheeze, partly because the punch was a bitch and partly because Rumlow seems like the type who’s just going to get angry at a lack of reaction. The atmosphere in the small room relaxes almost tangibly as Steve gives them an expected reaction.

The woman snorts, and somehow makes the noise elegant. “Worried he’s going to take your place?” she asks. She has a slight accent in her voice Steve hadn’t noticed before, something Eastern European.

Steve’s just opened his mouth to say something bitchy about not wanting to be part of their super-secret thing anyway - he doesn’t know what, but it was going to be stunningly witty and annoying - when Rumlow punches him again, harder than before, so maybe her needling has hit its mark. Steve doesn’t fucking know, their conversation was in a foreign language and he’s always been shit at spycraft besides. Unless he’s given lines, the most he can improvise in the field is a stilted conversation about the weather.

“And I know who you are,” Rumlow says, grinning when Steve looks back at him. “Steve Rogers, codename Captain America,” his mouth twists at the words, “and you will also be declared dead in a few hours, when we’re done with you.”

“Somehow,” Steve says slowly, because unlike Rumlow he hadn’t ignored the woman hovering behind him, and he hadn’t missed the way her whole body seemed to hitch when Rumlow had said his name out loud, “I don’t think that’s going to happen.” She turns her head slightly to meet his eyes, her face wiped blank of expression.

“Oh?” Rumlow asks, finally taking out a knife from his belt. “I’d like to hear how you think you’re going to get out of this. And don’t,” he adds, “say your team is coming after you. Give us some credit.”

Steve doesn’t know what he’s expecting. He’s sure that he’s never seen the red-headed woman before in his life and he doesn’t know why she would help him, but that pause in her body had been unmistakeable: she knew him from somewhere, and she did not want to kill him. Or, possibly, she knew him from somewhere and wanted to kill him slowly and painfully. It was difficult to tell, with her.

Rumlow takes another knife out of his belt, and begins to flip them through the air theatrically. Steve shifts his eyes to the woman, whose movement towards him is subtle enough to almost be overlooked.

She leans into him until her mouth is not even a moment away from his ear, and her voice is quieter than the rustle of her clothes when she asks, “What did you call Barnes?”

When she pulls away, he’s sure his expression’s gone pale and tight, close to terrified, because _how did she know Bucky_. Nobody knew about Bucky, not in Steve’s current life. Erskine was dead, and Fury had a mouth like a steel trap.

“What -” the woman gives him a reproachful look when he tries to speak, and Rumlow turns around, finally distracted from his knives, a smirk blooming on his face when he catches sight of Steve’s expression. His mind feels like it’s plummeting downwards at a hundred miles an hour, a freefall that’s worse than anything Steve’s ever experienced in either body. This had to be some kind of trap, some kind of game, but - how did this woman know about Bucky? His thoughts are wild and circling. Why would she ask about him now, here, three years too late?

The only person hurt by the information is Steve, and, fuck, maybe he just wants to say the name after spending so long guarding it. “Bucky,” he breathes, and something in the woman’s expression seems to soften, for a second, before she lowers her head, steps back.

Only one of the three men in the tiny room have any kind of instinct for this kind of job, apparently, because only one of them looks even mildly worried by this exchange.

“Well?” Rumlow asks, apparently having finally decided on a knife and stepping forward. “I still haven’t heard your reason. You should go,” he adds, twisting around to jerk his head at the woman. “This might get ugly.” She rolls her eyes very slightly, which is possibly the most emotion she’s displayed so far.

Steve wants to say something witty but his words have deserted him; the only thing running through his mind is _Bucky Bucky Bucky_.

The woman inclines her head a little. “Try him,” she says, and it sounds as though she’s speaking to Rumlow but her green gaze is fixed on Steve and she tilts her head ever so slightly at Rumlow.

It’s not like Steve has anything to lose, so he pushes himself off the wall as suddenly as he can. When the three men, already uneasy, lurch forward at the motion Steve simply grabs one of them and throws him at Rumlow. The two men collide with much swearing and fall backwards into the opposite wall. While Rumlow is occupied with his sudden entanglement Steve pivots and lands a kick to his head that drops him like a stone. 

The room is silent while the four people inside are still. The three still-unnamed men are back to being unsettled as they grimace and eye Steve warily; the one closest to Rumlow kneels down to check for a pulse, and the other two edge closer as though this will help.

The woman swings around fluidly and gets up on one guy’s shoulders to bring him down; the other two converge on Steve, apparently deeming him the greater threat. This suits him fine, because he can keep them very occupied with minimal effort while the woman sneaks up behind them and takes them out when they forget to guard their backs. Her fighting style is athletic and involves her thighs a lot, and despite the fact that they seem to at least know of her the men seem unprepared for her particular style of fighting.

When the guy Steve’s fighting realises he’s the last one standing, his blows get even worse, panicky and wide. He makes it altogether too easy for Steve to just get a grip on his shoulder and shove him to the ground. He would’ve let the fight end there - the man was making no effort to get up - but the woman comes back over and, merciless, knots her fingers in his hair and uses it to slam his head into the ground once, twice. It seems unnecessarily violent until Steve looks over at the other men and sees their necks at strange angles, at which point it seems abundantly unnecessarily violent.

“How do you know about Bucky?” he demands anyway, because his priorities have always been somewhat skewed when it comes to Bucky.

Outside their small record-sampling room, the shop is empty and the door is, mercifully, locked - Rumlow or the woman must have taken care of that - but a small crowd seems to have gathered at the shop front. Steve can vaguely hear someone calling for someone else to call the police. He looks to the woman, who beckons him to follow her as she crawls out of the record-sampling room and towards the counter at the back of the shop. Steve follows, somewhat bewildered, and they have to pass the shop assistant, who lies on her back, eyes empty. The woman closes those eyes, in a quiet moment that Steve doesn’t know how to explain, and then she’s moving again, leaving the body behind.

Steve follows, and the woman slips into the storage room and opens a trapdoor that leads into a passageway. She sets a punishing pace through the corridor, which is definitely underground and mostly dirt and rocks under Steve’s feet. He’s running fast enough that he doesn’t realise he’s been left alone for a few steps, and by the time he does the woman’s brought another gate across between them and locked it. He stares at her through the bars for a moment, too surprised to say a word.

“What are you _doing_?” is what decides to come out of his mouth.

“I can’t leave,” she whispers, something fearful and a little longing in her expression that belies her desire to do just that.

“You can’t stay, we just killed those men!” Steve tries to keep his voice down as he points out, quite reasonably, he thinks.

“We didn’t,” she murmurs. “You did. I tried to stop you. You got away.”

Steve steps forward, grasps the gate between them. The desperation that he can’t be fucked to hide shows in every line of his body. “How do you know about Bucky?” he asks again. His knuckles are white on the bars between them.

She looks back and steps forward like she’s going to tell him a secret. “He’s alive,” she breathes, so light that he’s afraid he’s heard wrong.

Steve swears his entire body just - stops functioning, for a second.

“Here? Where is he? _Tell me where he is_ ,” Steve says, and he’s not above admitting that he’s begging.

The woman looks like she might be about to answer, for a second. Then banging echoes through the corridor, and she takes a step back.

“I’ll be in touch,” she says. Those green eyes are still fixed on Steve’s, and he can see she’s trying to exude honesty. The real problem is whether he believes it. “You better hurry now.” Steve stays where he is despite her words. It takes a moment to register what she’d said. She offers a weak smile as she backs away. “Good luck.”

“No - no, wait -” Steve cries, shaking the bars he’s still gripping and cursing them for being solid. She turns her back on him and runs around the corner. He can hear her shouting in Russian, hear the creak of the metal door as it opens and then more voices, coming closer. When the woman turns the corner again, she has Rumlow and several guns at hand. Steve takes her advice and hurries, runs down the corridor with gunfire echoing in his head.

He runs his fingertips along both walls as he runs, and neither of them offer him any options so he just keeps moving forward as fast as he can. It doesn’t feel like it would be a trick when a minute later he nearly runs into a door marked EXIT, but he still refuses to underestimate these people, and when he slides the door open it’s as quietly and unobtrusively as he knows how.

It simply opens into the end of an alleyway that looks just like every other alleyway in New York, including the reassuring visual of bright lights and passing cars. An annoyed driver blares his horn and receives several honks in return. It probably says something about Steve that he’s reassured by the noise of angry drivers, but that’s the noise which brings him out of the doorway and let the door close behind him. As is probably sensible for an underground terrorist base, there’s no actual way to open the door from the outside that Steve can see.

The evening air chooses that moment to stir fussily around Steve’s shoulders and bring his attention back to the fact that he doesn’t have a shirt on. The temperature is high enough that jogging shirtless probably won’t be met by too many raised eyebrows, but Steve has never liked having all those eyes on him.

He only needs to get out of the alley before he recognises where he is and how to get to the nearest SHIELD safehouse, he’s so close to home. He runs - well, possibly faster than is normal for a casual jogger, but he swears he can feel the overthinking and anxiety descending on him. Running keeps it at bay.

Or, running keeps it at bay for around two minutes. He’d hoped to get to the safehouse before breaking down, but, well, any alleyway will do, apparently. The brick wall he’s leaning against is warm from the night air and supportive when Steve lets his legs rest.

He has always been shitty at compartmentalising. It’s part of the reason he’s not an undercover agent, and never plans on being one. He just can’t - he has too much emotion to be able to separate everything for an op the way some agents can. And he might have gotten a little better at it over the years, but hearing someone bring up Bucky, hearing someone say he’s _alive_ \- it brings Steve right back to the day two army-uniformed men had rung his doorbell and he’d gone utterly pale and unsteady at the sight of them. It’d been the first time his newly-muscled body had felt weak, the realisation that everything, the paperwork and experiments and the serum, had been too late. Whatever misadventures he’s suffered during his time at SHIELD, no day has ever come close to being as awful as that one. If he finds out the woman was just playing him for some reason, though - well, there’s going to be a strong contender for second place, probably.

_She had no reason to lie_ , something stupid and hopeful and optimistic in him says. Which is, technically, true, but him not knowing her motivation and her not having a motivation are two very different things. She’d changed her behaviour when she’d found out Steve’s name, but she’d used Bucky’s nickname as a passcode; it was possible that she wouldn’t have helped him if he hadn’t known the answer. But if she’d been using it as a code-word only, for some indefinable agenda, that wouldn’t necessitate telling Steve that Bucky was alive, would it? He doesn’t know anything, he can’t think - he’s a good tactician, he knows he is, but he’s not good at espionage and counter-espionage. He doesn’t know how to deal with the mixed and muddled signals of the underground, only what to do with the information condensed from them.

The army had declared Bucky killed in action three years ago. That was a fact. It’s what he’d been told and it’s what he’d found when Tony agreed to hack into a military database for the sake of Steve’s morbid curiosity. Bucky’s team had been captured. In the operation to get them back, Bucky and two other men had been killed in an IED blast. Whether he was alive or not, the army had found an arm and enough blood to declare Bucky dead. The testimonies had been clear and every witness had agreed and it lined up with what those two too-kind men had said to Steve. They’d buried the arm in a closed-casket funeral. Steve had been too sad to cry, and somehow felt like he’d been crying for days.

Even if Bucky had survived the loss of a limb and his proximity to the blast, that meant he’d been stranded, in hostile territory, in a fucking desert, bleeding copiously and lacking a limb. And even if he’d miraculously managed to survive all that, he’s had three years to get in touch, if not with Steve then with Becca. All of the facts point to his death in action. The woman can’t have been right, can only have been stringing him along, or talking about some nebulous other Bucky Barnes who’d loved a Steve Rogers. There is little to no logical basis to what the woman had said to him, and yet -

And yet. He can never tell whether those words are his best friend or greatest enemy. The brick wall is rough against the skin of his forehead when Steve lets his head drop. There is a burning in his eyes and throat.

He’d made his peace with this. He’d thought he’d made his peace with this, but here he was leaning his body against solid brick because he wants the strength in its support, hoping desperately and foolishly, against all the odds, that the redheaded woman hadn’t been lying, that somehow Bucky was still alive.

Fuck, but it _hurts_ , this confused, jumbled state of not-knowing. It can’t have been more than an hour since Steve ran.

He jumps when someone comes up behind him and steps on glass, actually jumps in a way he hasn’t for years.

“Hey, you okay?” a light voice asks, and Steve can only nod blindly. He tries to bring himself back, to focus on the wall in front of him instead of Bucky’s face in his mind, strapped to a table or being caught in an explosion or screaming or dehydrated and dying in the middle of a desert with nobody coming for him. He’s not entirely successful.

“I’m fine,” he chokes out in a somewhat level voice. When he hastily takes to his heels again, he prefers to think he’s running towards the safe house instead of away from the well-meaning questions behind him.

He pushes himself hard, harder than before, enough that he definitely doesn’t blend in with the average evening jogger. This time the avoidance tactic works better, and the simple clean burning of his muscles and lungs distract him from his own thoughts, from any thoughts. By the time he reaches the safehouse he’s panting and winded, legs trembling slightly beneath him. A thin sheen of sweat covers his body. He hadn’t meant to sprint the entire considerable distance to the safehouse but he can’t quite bring himself to regret it even if it aroused suspicion.

Still, he makes sure that his breathing’s evened out before he picks up the phone to call Coulson. His team leader probably wouldn’t have such a permissive attitude.

“Coulson,” Coulson says shortly when he picks up.

“Go secure,” Steve says.

“Go,” Coulson says a moment later, all business.

“Follow-up mission was a failure,” Steve decides to report first, since Coulson will probably appreciate the bad news first. “The three targets met with two higher-ups, I was engaged.”

“Do I want to know -?”

“Fairly sure the three are dead and the two higher-ups are alive,” Steve says. “Almost definitely part of a larger organisation, as we suspected.”

“You have anything to go on?” Coulson asks.

“A, a group of faces,” Steve says. “A few names.” _Bucky_ , he nearly says, but Coulson doesn’t know about Bucky and Steve’s too used to keeping the name close to let it go now. “We need to start researching them. Start by gathering intel on Brock Rumlow, codename Crossbones -”

“Of SHIELD?” Coulson asks, voice goin pitchy with concern. “I remember him - Steve, are you sure it was him?”

“ _Yes_ , I’m sure,” Steve hisses. “And when I mentioned he was was presumed dead the other guys started looking real shifty, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say they are too - _fuck_ -” Presumed dead. _Bucky_ was presumed dead. But he wouldn’t - there was no way he would join an organisation like this one of his own free will, Steve refused to believe that - but if he’d been coerced - could the others have been coerced? Was that how the redheaded woman had known Steve, and known he would know Bucky? He shakes his head, tries to continue. “A red-headed woman, green eyes, trained, faint Eastern European accent -”

“Steve? _Steve_ ,” Coulson hisses on the phone. “Listen, we can’t do that.”

“What?”

“We can’t do that,” Coulson repeats. “The Committee shut us down. Operations handed over to the CIA. Steve, there’s no more SHIELD.”

Steve leans forward into the cold glass of the window in front of him. The bright lights of Brooklyn, underneath him, seem to blur and fade for a moment as his eyes stop trying to focus.

“I’ve been ordered to bring everyone in,” Coulson says. His voice sounds awfully distant, compared to just a few seconds ago.

“Fuck,” Steve says at that, rousing himself slightly. “Fuck, no - I can’t -”

“What are you doing?” Coulson asks, somewhat suspiciously.

“They mentioned - someone I know. Knew,” Steve allows himself to correct, so Coulson will get the full picture.

He’s sharp, Coulson, and he sighs before continuing, slower than before. “Obviously, the Committee and the CIA want you to be absorbed into the CIA,” he says, “but you’d be well within your rights to resign. A few agents have already unofficially done so. I don’t want you to get in trouble, and it won’t take much time out of your day to come in and hand in an official resignation.”

“I - sure, sure,” Steve says. It’s not like he has anything to go on or any direct and immediate plan of action, after all, as much as he might wish that was the case. “When? Tomorrow?”

“Anytime tomorrow should be fine,” Coulson agrees. “Langley, my office.”

“You have an office?” Steve asks.

“Apparently,” Coulson says. “I don’t know where it is, or what room number it is, but I’m supposed to be assigned one by tomorrow morning.”

“Alright,” Steve says, somewhat uselessly. “Will do.”

“See you then,” Coulson says, and hangs up before Steve can think of anything else to say.

Steve thunks his head once more onto the glass in front of him, and has to resist the impulse to repeat the action. If there is a terrorist organisation with branches in Brooklyn, and Bucky in their grasp - he doesn’t know how to end that sentence. Bucky had been presumed dead for three years. Steve has spent that time missing him, a low dull ache, but the possibility of getting him back makes that pain flare into determination, bright and burning.

~*~

LOCATION: CIA HEADQUARTERS  
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

“Well hello there,” a voice behind Steve tries to purr. It might have successfully sounded seductive if it hadn’t been so very sleazy, or if Steve hadn’t known the speaker before he could even finish his first word.

“Hi, Tony,” Steve says without turning around. His arms are folded neatly behind his back as he tilts his head at the exact angle to make it seem like he’s studying the cornerstone with DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER emblazoned across it. Tony scoffs behind him, and Steve grins at the smooth stone. He hadn’t been expecting Tony, and knowing the other man it probably wasn’t a coincidence that they were both here at the same instant.

“Hi, Tony,” Tony mocks. “That’s all I get, after saving your asses in Germany?”

“If you hadn’t had that gala thing to go to we wouldn’t’ve been in a situation where I needed to jump onto an airborne plane,” Steve says sweetly. Tony’s mouth drops open.

“Bull _shit_ ,” he says, and when Steve merely raises his eyebrows he throws his hands up. “I’m fucking done, what the fuck.”

“Are you, though?” Steve asks, as Tony successfully pulls him away from the President’s memorial stone. Steve has no idea where he’s going but Tony seems exceedingly confident about their direction, so much so that he’s tugging Steve along at a rate that makes it difficult to ask someone for directions, or even make eye contact.

“Hell yeah I’m done,” Tony says. “Who’d want to work in this dump?”

Steve knows that it’s useless to point out that this dump is in fairly excellent condition, bright lights gleaming off of shining stone floors. Steve also knows that it’s pointless to draw attention to the fact that the corridor they’re walking though is populated with people who did choose to work at the CIA and that a few of them are currently aiming some impressive glares at Tony, because Tony has noticed that for himself, and has occupied himself by returning as many glares as he can. Tony is an asshole.

Steve walks a little faster in an attempt to leave him behind, but Tony manages to match his pace without even appearing to speed up.

“MS-6, MS-6,” Tony mutters. MS-6 is the office Coulson has been assigned to, according to the email Steve had received shortly after his phone call.

“Do you even know where you’re going?” Steve asks, as Tony resumes his previous frenetic pace down the corridor and takes a sharp right turn.

“Yeah,” Tony says, in the same tone he uses to say _Duh_. “You don’t?”

“Why would I ever need to know the schematics of Langley,” Steve says. Tony shrugs.

“Just in case?” he says, and then stops, so suddenly that Steve walks into him. “Fuck, stop that, this is the room, get off me.”

“If you’d stop _stopping_ right in front of me -” Steve starts to protest, aggrieved, but then Tony opens the door and Steve shuts up.

“Gentlemen,” Coulson says as the two of them walk into the specified room. The two other men in the room also look up from their computer and phone respectively. Steve recognises Alexander Pierce, because he’s not oblivious enough to the politics in the country not to, but the other man is a mystery to him.

“My resignation,” Steve says, and hands it to Coulson, uncomfortably making eye contact with the desk instead of anyone actually in the room.

“Oh, come on,” the unfamiliar guy says cajolingly. “You’re one of the best agents SHIELD has! We could do a lot with a man like you,” he says, like being vague is the key to being tempting.

The door opens again, and Steve takes the timely opportunity to slink back so that he’s no longer the centre of attention. He’s about to nudge Tony into handing in his own resignation so the two of them can leave, but Tony’s been distracted by the newcomer.

“Bruce!” he calls out joyfully, so loudly that the quiet scientist starts and nearly steps back.

“Hi, Tony,” he says, relaxing and pushing up his glasses after the initial shock.

“Are you resigning too?” Tony asks, wiggling his resignation letter around helpfully.

“Um,” Bruce says, red in the face. He pushes his glasses up his nose again. “Yes?”

“Too? You don’t mean to say you’re all resigning?” the unfamiliar man says incredulously.

“I did tell you the absorption rate would probably be low,” Coulson murmurs, in a voice that’s not meant to be heard by the others in the room but undeniably is.

“CIA - America, in fact, would benefit greatly from your continued contribution to our country,” Pierce says.

“I’ve no intention of selling any of my weapons or weaponisable tech to the CIA,” Tony says, voice unusually sharp. Steve turns to look at him in surprise, and out of the corner of his eye he can see Bruce do the same. “I wouldn’t sell it to the CIA,” he continues, “or the FBI or NSA or any other three-letter spying agency, or any lettered spying agency, or even a numbered spying agency -”

“That’s not what this -” the still unknown man says, a little desperately, as Tony begins to hit his stride. Bruce kicks him in the leg, and that is slightly more conducive to stopping Tony before he can start ranting.

“Anyway,” Tony says, as dignified as he can be considering he was kicked in the leg only moments ago by a coworker. “I’m too busy working on clean energy to bother with a hobby on the side, and Bruce and Steve are coming with me.” He tries to grab Bruce’s hand, realises he still has his letter of resignation, and throws it on the table before retreating. Steve follows them out the door hastily, amidst the weak protests from the guy that Steve still doesn’t know.

“I don’t mean to - I mean, I’m coming with you?” Bruce asks confusedly as he’s dragged down the corridor.

“Of course you are,” Tony declares breezily. “It’s not like I have a tower or anything. Stevo, you’re coming too.”

“I what?” Steve asks, not that inquisitively because he’d expected the offer. Tony, for all his bluster and sarcastic comments, was absolutely the kind of person who’d offer to take in all the SHIELD staff displaced by their sudden lack of salary and company-subsidised lodging. “Do I not get a say?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony mutters inanely, and gestures the two of them into his ostentatiously fancy car. “I’m glad I didn’t sign onto that fucking shitshow,” he says, apparently out of nowhere. Happy, in the driver’s seat, nods in the infinitely obliging way he has.

“We should arrive back at Stark Tower in approximately four hours, sir,” he says.

“They made me drive four fucking hours just to resign, I can’t fucking believe it,” Tony starts to grumble. Bruce and Steve exchange a glance that is fonder than either of them want to admit, and settle in for a long drive back to the Tower.

~*~

LOCATION: STARK TOWER, FLOOR 39  
LATE AFTERNOON, MANHATTAN, NEW YORK

Bruce excuses himself to his floor almost as soon as Tony tells him which one is his, but Steve accompanies Tony onto the communal floor because he hasn’t had lunch, and wants to take advantage of the food here.

Pepper’s got her feet up on the table, quite literally, and when she looks up the first thing she says is, “Oh, I got your letter, Steve, I -”

Steve pulls what is probably a very strange face and asks, “What letter?”

Tony, predictably, looks between the two of them and begins protesting. “Pepper, Pepper-pot, light of my life, my dear, I come back after an absence and all you have to say is to my colleague? I even stopped at the farmer’s market to get you peaches because I am an excellent boyfriend who remembered you like them and are allergic to strawberries, and I don’t even warrant a greeting? That hurts me, Pepper. It hurts me in my _soul_ ,” he finishes dramatically, with a gesture to his chest.

“I stopped at the farmer’s market,” Happy corrected, walking out of the lift and heading very purposefully to the food.

“Happy stopped at the farmer’s market,” Tony acknowledges, “and I waded through the crowds and remembered you were allergic to strawberries this time, win for me!”

“Thanks, Tony,” Pepper says. Her eyes are trying to roll but there’s a tiny smile at the corner of her mouth.

“Okay,” Tony says, mollified by this attention, “but we need to figure out what this letter’s about.”

“Did it use the name you assigned me?” Steve asks. Pepper nods, and leans over to grab an envelope out of her bag.

“You opened it?” Tony yelps, and Pepper eyes him.

“It did make it past the screening at the Tower, Tony,” she says, and he subsides with a slight pout, which becomes a frown as he looks at the name on the envelope.

“This says it’s from a Devlin Thornhill,” he says suspiciously. “When did - what - is that a Notorious reference _and_ and North By Northwest reference?”

“Oh, I didn’t think you’d get the Notorious reference, well done,” Pepper says. “I’m glad to know our movie nights are giving you a bit of culture.”

“I have culture,” Tony says, pointing at her. She regards the offending digit with equanimity, even as it shakes in her direction. “I have culture. Stop trying to distract me, should I be worried that you named him after not one but two dashing Cary Grant characters? When did it even get changed?”

Pepper just smiles, which does nothing to allay those suspicions. “Tony, you asked him to sign off as Roger Grant,” Pepper says. When this does not elicit a reaction, she and Steve both somehow manage to roll their eyes in unison.

“Roger Grant is the most appallingly obvious code name in history,” Steve says bluntly.

“I see your point,” Tony says slowly, “but also, consider: I’m bad at coding things that aren’t numbers.”

“I can tell,” Pepper says, with an actual smile this time that is all fondness, so clearly Tony isn’t hopeless beyond repair. “That’s why I changed the name.”

“Ugh, and we have to change it again after this,” Tony grumbles. “Okay, but why -?” he starts to continue, only to be cut off by Steve.

“These are opera tickets,” he says. “For a performance in _Sokovia_.”

Pepper shrugs elegantly. “I assumed you needed some sort of cover,” she says.

“Could it be a mistake?” he asks.

“I doubt it,” Pepper says, and wiggled the computer on her lap slightly. “No giveaways.”

“What performance?” Tony asks, craning his neck to see the tickets.

“Turandot,” Steve supplies with a frown.

“It’s a legitimate performance,” Pepper says helpfully. “As in, they’re performing Turandot during those dates. And they’re legitimate tickets, as far as I can tell.” Pepper’s eye is fairly good; it’d take a good forgery to get past her, Steve knows. “It’s the one you took me to for my birthday, remember?” she asks, turning to Tony.

“I remember!” Tony exclaims, although knowing him his memories of the opera mostly involve his impression of the acoustics or something. “I’m cultured,” he insists, and points a finger at her again, which she regards with just as much insouciance as before. “Anyway, it’s not like we’re going to this one, right?”

“No, I - I mean yes -” Steve breaks off and takes a frustrated breath. “I just, I mean whatever one means we are going to see it.”

Tony boggles. “We are?”

“I mean,” Steve says. “I met someone on my last follow-up mission, and she mentioned, um. Getting in touch.”

“In Sokovia?” Tony asks skeptically.

“She was very vague,” Steve says.

“Oh,” Tony says.

“I mean, you don’t have to come,” Steve adds hastily.

“Fuck you, someone has to keep your dumb ass out of trouble,” Tony says, and promptly starts to grumble about, “the things I do for you, honestly, fuck -”

“Oh, well, that’s good, anyway,” Pepper says. “I took the liberty of clearing your weekend schedule.”

“The things I do for this boy,” Tony grumbles, like Steve isn’t right next to him. “How far -”

“Nine hours,” Pepper says promptly. Steve doubts that there’s ever a time where she isn’t miraculously well-prepared for all questions.

“Couldn’t you come -” Tony begins hopefully, and Pepper cuts him off before the question can even be fully articulated.

“Not a chance,” she says, very firmly. “And I have three reasons,” she adds, when Tony opens his mouth again. “I have meetings over the weekend that won’t be easily shifted, I don’t trust Steve to let me sit through an opera without shooting something -”

“That’s fair enough,” Steve admits a little sheepishly, and Tony rolls his eyes.

“What’s the third reason?”

Pepper smiles sweetly at him. “The most important reason,” she says. “I’ve already seen Turandot with you, and it was lovely.”

“Fine,” Tony grumbles, and turns around. “Fucking - fine, Jesus, you owe me -”

“You don’t have to fucking come if you’re going to keep dragging it out like this either -” Steve grumbles right back. “Where are you going? We can’t take the car to Sokovia, and we have two days to get there.”

“I know that,” Tony says.

“I arranged the plane trip with Happy,” Pepper says. “You leave tomorrow afternoon.”

“Thank you, Pepper,” Steve says, trying to be as sincere as he feels. Tony pokes him in the bicep, hard.

“Why, Miss Potts, I do declare,” Tony says. “It seems like you want to get rid of me.”

“Only if you come back,” Pepper says smoothly. Tony whistles appreciatively, and goes over to greet her properly. Steve makes himself scarce among the food in the kitchen area.

“I might just head over to Sokovia now,” he calls over to Tony and Pepper once they’d graduated from greeting each other to sitting in comfortable silence.

“What?” Tony asks.

“Just to get there asap,” Steve says. “I can set up a base and case the theatre, all that good stuff.”

“You just think you’re going to get bored here,” Tony accuses, and Steve shrugs too late for it to be considered a real denial.

“We should be prepared,” he says. “We don’t have SHIELD behind us anymore.”

“You’re bored _and_ paranoid,” Tony says. “What a combination.”

“Okay, good, that’s settled,” Steve says, and turns to leave.

“I’ll just book you a flight on the next flight to Sokovia then, shall I?” Pepper asks.

“Uh,” Steve says, sheepish. “I was just going to turn up at the airport.”

“And that’s why Coulson doesn’t put you in charge of mission logistics,” Pepper murmurs to her tablet. She looks up at Steve and raises an eyebrow. “You’d better get going, you need to be at the airport in two hours.”

“Thanks, Pepper,” Steve says, and as she waves him away she has a smile on her face.


	2. Chapter 2

LOCATION: SOKOVIA NATIONAL THEATRE  
EVENING, SOKOVIA, SOKOVIA

It was true that Steve had left Tony to take the plane trip alone and, more importantly, navigate the public transport system on his own. Still, he thought it was going to be pretty difficult for Tony to miss all the brightly coloured system maps on the wall and the stop that is helpfully named Sokovia National Theatre Stop. Steve himself had had no trouble navigating the remarkably clean and efficient public transport system, regardless of the substantial crowd.

Somehow, Tony always strikes a recognisable figure in a crowd. It may have something to do with the fact that Steve’s known him for a few years now, or that he’s something of celebrity, but personally Steve thinks it has something to do with his constant motion. Even in the middle of a moving crowd, Tony strikes one as moving _more_ : fingers flicking, centre of gravity shifting, stride constantly changing. He’s easy to spot, is the thing, and Steve does so as soon as he exits his subway car.

In the mass of people getting on and off the train, it’s not hard at all to bump into Tony and stick the glasses and opera ticket down the breast pocket of his suit. It’s immensely satisfying when Steve makes his way to the end of the platform and exits the station without a peep out of Tony.

There’s another bump, and a muttered expletive, and only then can Steve hear the shifting of the glasses.

“I can’t believe this,” Tony’s voice says into Steve’s earpiece. “I don’t believe it. You absolutely ruined the line and cut of my suit, just stuffing these glasses in there. It’s barbaric. And you didn’t even get the prescription right.

“Good to hear from you too, Tony,” Steve says. It’s meant to sound annoyed, but it probably doesn’t.

“You’ve been here for like twenty hours longer than I have, so you better have a plan,” Tony says. “Chop chop, this better be good.”

“Like your plans are any good,” Steve snipes. Tony lets that go, and as he comes out onto the street Steve can see him fumbling in his pockets, because talking into a phone is less suspicious than muttering at empty air. Most of the people in the crowd are talking busily on phones of their own or tangled in maps, so the subterfuge isn’t really necessary, but it’s good to be on the safe side anyway.

“Plan,” Tony demands once he has the phone held up to his ear, neatly avoiding a violinist on the street corner who seems to think that movement of the elbows is the be-all and end-all of her music.

“So I tracked a guy here,” Steve says obligingly.

“That’s like the one thing I already know,” Tony says, because Steve had sent him the technically off-limits SHIELD profile of Brock Rumlow around fifteen hours ago.

“Well, the original plan was just to get you to cross-reference the audience here with the sketches I sent you so I could take him down -”

“I could do that from the Tower,” Tony points out. “You could have called back and then I wouldn’t’ve had to spend nine hours on a plane to get to a showing of an opera I’ve already watched.”

“You always complain when we ask you to do this stuff that remotely,” Steve says. He takes up a comfortable position walking at Tony’s pace across the road and a few paces behind him, thoroughly embedded in a small crowd of operagoers. “ _Always_. So forgive me for not wanting to go through that -”

“No, no,” Tony interrupts. He even goes so far as to flutter a hand over his head as he continues, “Don’t say another word. I understand _perfectly_.”

“Oh, you do, do you -”

“You _missed me_ ,” Tony says gleefully, with a shit-eating grin that must be truly impressive, given some of the looks that Steve can see aimed at him.

“That’s not the point right now,” Steve snaps, in a serious enough tone that it’ll take a second for Tony to realise what that statement means and start feeling warm inside. “The point,” Steve continues, “is that that’s the old plan.”

“What went wrong with it?” Tony asks.

“Um,” Steve says. “I found out that the Sokovian Prime Minister’s going to attend tonight’s showing. Of Turandot,” he adds, just in case that hadn’t been clear.

“So at least one known member of a highly sophisticated criminal organisation is at the opera on the same night the Prime Minister is attending?” Tony asks. “Not suspicious at all.”

“Exactly,” Steve says. “And then I got the free concert tickets, which. I think that’s a pretty definite signal.”

“From the woman who helped you,” Tony says.

“Yes,” Steve confirms.

“Who is apparently helping you again. For no reason.”

“Yes,” Steve confirms again, in as blank a tone as he can manage and ignoring the suspicion in Tony’s voice.

“Seriously,” Tony says. “I’m going to need more than that. Did you even think about the possibility that this is a trap?”

“Of course I did,” Steve says, vaguely insulted.

“You should be insulted, it was stupid of you to try and get that one past me,” Tony says bluntly. “So?”

Steve’s sigh is loud enough that he hears it transmit through the comms, and since Tony’s programmed these things to filter out background noise like breathing that means it’s a pretty loud sigh. “I can’t - it might be nothing,” Steve says. There’s a twisting sensation in his belly at saying it out loud, but he can’t deny it. “But it might not. And even if it’s a trap, I can’t - I have to take the chance, you know?”

“You’re being stupidly cagey about this,” Tony points out, and Steve winces. It’s not fair of him to keep things like this from Tony, especially when Tony is working the mission with him, but he can’t - he can’t bring himself to say this to Tony, in the same way and for the same reason that he couldn’t tell Tony why he’d asked him to search through military databases for a Barnes, James Buchanan. It’d make everything too real. It’d make the disappointment worse, if this turned out to be nothing.

“It might be a trap,” Steve says. “But the bait is - worth the risk. Even if it’s nothing. Can you trust me on that, Tony, please?”

“Only if you tell me what it is after the mission,” Tony says, after a long and painful pause. “Whether it’s there or not.”

“I - okay,” Steve mumbles.

“So, what’s the new plan?” Tony asks, and Steve seizes onto the new line of conversation gratefully.

“It’s basically the same as the old plan,” Steve admits, “except now you can search for the woman as well. I just thought it’d be better to have backup now that things are more, you know, definite.”

“That’s flattering,” Tony mutters. “And what’re you going to do when you find them?”

The suspicion is clear in his voice, so Steve decides to put his mind to rest by saying, “I wasn’t serious about the shooting people thing,” very reassuringly. Of course, he promptly ruins it by following it up with a, “Not _that_ serious, anyway,” which gets him a huffy sort of growl.

“Shooting anyone at all is bad for public relations, even I know that,” Tony says severely. Up ahead of Steve, an elderly man side-eyes Tony and then sidles away slowly.

“Can you get into the security cameras?” Steve asks in lieu of laughing, and Tony sighs.

“You’re so fucking demanding, I swear,” he says as he fumbles with his briefcase. “Fly nine hours to Sokovia, Tony, go see Turandot, Tony, hack into the security cameras, Tony -” He breaks off and finds a bench to sit down on, because he can’t walk and handle the computer at the same time, and also because apparently Sokovia is the kind of country that has random benches on sidewalks for the comfort of the people. Steve takes the opportunity to pass him by and turn the corner, whereupon the National Theatre comes into view.

“Going to the opera is a privilege,” Steve says indignantly.

“I’ve already seen it -” Tony starts to defend, and Steve scoffs very pointedly over the line. “I’m cultured, Rogers,” Tony insists, in the tone that is nearly always accompanied by accusatory finger-pointing.

“I’m going to bite your finger off,” Steve threatens.

“Fuck you,” Tony returns, somewhat lazily. “I guess if you don’t want my expertise and access into security cameras I can just pack up and leave -”

“Oh, fuck you,” Steve says irritably. “You see anyone?”

“I don’t trust fallible human eyes,” Tony says, and Steve knows from experience that the statement is only half a joke. “If JARVIS finds a 95-percent or higher facial match with the profile he’ll alert us,” he says.

“Cheers,” Steve says, but all he hears in response is an indrawn breath, and that’s how he knows Tony’s turned the corner and had his first glance of the Sokovian National Theatre. Steve had appreciated it, and he had no background in architecture or engineering; Tony, on the other hand, has both those things, and thus is in a much better place to be overawed at the building.

“Oh, that’s nice,” Tony says, because the national theatre is a very impressive national theatre. “You know I prefer my nice modern -” he pauses for a moment, and Steve can imagine him waving his hands around in search for the perfect adjective, “- _sleek_ buildings, but there is always something to be said for these old-as-fuck buildings that’re restored to, to _heights of glory_.”

“Mm,” Steve says absently, because Tony tends to expect a response to his rants. He’s just climbed a set of stairs to a decent vantage point when he sees Tony come in, stop still, and sigh happily. The room is gorgeous - _rich_ comes to mind as the best descriptor - lush red carpet everywhere, smooth old stone walls, _chandeliers_. Steve knows that Tony has a weakness for chandeliers; they’re so very unnecessarily fancy, which is probably why Tony likes them so much. Like attracts like, and all that.

“Tony,” Steve says, amused, as a worker patiently waits for Tony to hand over his ticket. Tony re-enters the world of the living with a visible start, and hands over the ticket with alacrity. The worker doesn’t seem fazed at all, so starstruck tourists are probably a regular sight. “Come up those stairs and pass me the tablet,” Steve says, but it’s altogether too soon; Tony is still half-entranced, and doesn’t hear a word.

“What?” he asks a few moments later.

“I said you should meet me somewhere to pass me the tablet,” Steve says, unable to get the amusement out of his voice.

“What?” Tony repeats. “Why?”

“Because you can’t use an electronic device in the middle of the opera,” Steve says, indignant. “That’s incredibly rude, Tony.”

“I know _that_ ,” Tony says. “Did you not hear me when I said I’d seen this before? If I hide somewhere I can direct you and you don’t have to juggle a tablet and do your fighty things. Also, I can’t be good backup in an audience, Cap.”

“Oh,” Steve says after a pause. He’d not thought Tony would do that, especially for a goal that Steve’s kept from him.

“You think I’d go to the opera while a teammate carries out a mission I can help with?” Tony asks, and the affront is clear in his voice.

“I know I was cagey about this one,” Steve says. After a pause, he adds, “Thank you,” and Tony grumbles, “Yeah, whatever, make better plans next time.”

“Shut up,” Steve says pettily as he watches Tony leave the entrance . “Where’re you setting up base?” He turns his gaze back to the room at large, slowly scanning the crowd for familiar faces.

“In this room right here,” Tony says, in a tone that starts out confident and dwindles away. The sound of a door closing firmly can be heard, and Tony amends, “Not in that room right there, it was a bathroom.”

“Just find somewhere and let me know if JARVIS comes up with any matches -” Steve breaks off abruptly, because his eyes alight on a woman giving her ticket to a worker, and he definitely knows that red hair and the slow self-assuredness of those movements. Sure enough, when she looks back up, Steve knows those features as well.

“Steve?” Tony asks. “Something the matter?”

“Do you see that woman?” Steve asks, even though Tony probably hasn’t found a place to reopen his laptop yet.

“What woman?” Tony asks, his frown audible. There’s a quiet-ish banging noise from his end of the comm channel, and the definitive sound of a door closing. “I see a lot of women, but I haven’t really been paying attention. I’m in a relationship now and everything,” he adds. Steve’s eyes track the woman as she makes a few leisurely rounds of the opera’s entrance hall. The crowd begins to leave, to filter through a door that will lead them to the theatre and their seats, but the woman stays behind.

“I know you are,” Steve says, aware that he sounds flustered, turning away from the balcony he’s on so that he won’t be visible to the woman if she looks up. “You’ve set up?”

“Yes,” Tony says irritably. “Camera-eyes operational and all that. What’s this about?”

“I - seriously, you must see her,” Steve ends up saying helplessly. “Longish red hair, green eyes, black and red dress, thigh split? There’s not even much of a crowd, everyone’s gone in because the opera’s starting soon, I don’t get how she’s just walking through the lobby.”

“I don’t see her,” Tony repeats. “Tell me this is important and you’re not just getting your head turned at a really inconvenient time. That would be just like you.”

“It’s important!” Steve hisses right back, flustered. “She was the one who helped me escape, that night, she’s clearly trained, she looks like she could kill you with a little finger - stop it with the skeptical silence, Tony,” he says, because the silence that Tony is keeping is definitely sceptical, Steve has had a while to learn what all of Tony’s silences sound like.

“That’s just a thing people say in bad dime novels, but alright,” Tony says, but he forestalls any argument on this point by raising another point to argue about, which is, “But I don’t know what she looks like because _you_ didn’t send me anything on her -”

“I wanted to protect her identity!” Steve protests.

“So how in the fuck am I meant to -”

“Well, fucking switch your camera view to the lobby and you should see her,” Steve snaps in the quietest voice he can manage. The crowd is nearly nonexistent by now, but the woman is still in the lobby, and she stand out.

“Oh,” Tony says, presumably upon seeing her. “Ohh. Okay. I see what you mean there. Regret is a negative lifestyle, but if you want me to eat my words -” he offer, and Steve cuts him off with a sigh.

“That won’t be necessary,” he says.

“She’s not the one you tracked here, though,” Tony says. “Who was?”

“No,” Steve confirms. “I mean, the tickets were my main hint. But once I had a location I could research who was coming, and Rumlow was on that list.”

“Cool,” Tony says distractedly. He’d been recruited after Rumlow had been reported KIA, but Steve had been able to send him Rumlow’s SHIELD profile, which was still up on the database. “I have some bad things to tell you about that guy.”  
“That...does not sound good,” Steve says, somewhat inanely, because Tony had literally said that it was going to be bad.

“Well done,” Tony says drily, but seems satisfied at making just the one joke, which means it’s really bad. “So I researched him on the plane trip here, and - not good, Steve-o. Not good at all.”

“Just hit me with it,” Steve says, which may not be the wisest choice, because Tony begins rattling off incidences immediately.

“He was in Turkey when the President of Malawi was killed. He was in Kuala Lumpur the day before a passenger plane went missing. I can place him in Manila within an hour of an accident in a petrochemical plant that killed three hundred people,” Tony says. Although his statements are all broken up into sentences it sounds like he says it in one continuous breath. “And all those things had bad economic repercussions - protests in Malawi, the board of a major bank losing three members, a petrochemical company going bust.”

“So If he’s here on the same evening as the Prime Minister of Sokovia,” Steve sums up, “that’s bad news.”

“Basically,” Tony agrees. “I have eyes on him now, though. And we already knew that, pretty much. Heads up,” he adds after a few moments where Steve watches the woman not move towards the theatre. “I might have to get rid of the laptop soon.”

“Why?” Steve asks, quite reasonably suspicious.

“I just sent a death threat to the Prime Minister,” Tony says.

“What?” Steve asks. His thoughts split between conflicting routes of _okay good they’ll be on guard for her_ and _but nothing’s going to happen unless they have bait_.

“I don’t know how seriously they’re going to take it, but they’ll hopefully be a little more on guard,” Tony says. The woman finally makes a movement to exit the lobby, but it’s not towards the theatre; it’s towards a door marked BACKSTAGE in several languages.

“I’m going to follow the woman,” Steve says as he begins to do just that. “She’s headed backstage.”

“Backstage doesn’t have cameras,” Tony points out as Steve slips up to the backstage door and presses his ear against it in a futile attempt to gauge whether the woman will see him if his slips through it now. “I’ve got eyes on Rumlow, but you keep shadowing your woman, because I don’t have eyes on her anymore.”

“I - okay, sure,” Steve whispers. “Keep me updated, alright?”

“He’s looking around in that really suspicious way amateurs do when they don’t want to be caught,” Tony narrates. “I’m disappointed in him, really. He’s ducked into the bathroom - and now he’s locked it behind him, which is kind of a dick move, considering there’s like twelve toilets there and he only has one ass. And now he’s sitting on the sink. That’s gross, dude, people wash their hands there.”

“What, he’s just sitting there?” Steve murmurs, as he takes the plunge and slips through the door into the dim and shadowed backstage area. It’s wreathed in shadows and stage props, dark towering figures and curtained corners that offer excellent hiding places.

“Now he’s climbing under the sink…” Tony trails off. The woman makes her way to a tower prop and begins to climb it, movements still slow and utterly self-assured.

“The woman’s climbed up into the tower,” Steve murmurs. “It’s going to go out on stage soon.”

“Where are we, fuck,” Tony mutters.

Steve hadn’t realised it when he first came into the backstage arae, to preoccupied with shadows and hiding, but if he concentrates he can hear the strains of music that carry back from the stage. “The Princess is about to start riddling, I think,” Steve says.

“So what, the next big stage change is for Nessun Dorma -”

“That’s what I’m guessing,” Steve says. “We have a bit of time.”

“Rumlow’s just picked up an instrument from under the sink,” Tony says.

“An instrument?” Steve asks. He knows he sounds baffled, and rightfully so.

“Apparently…?” Tony asks, and then in the next instant speaks again with realisation in his voice. “Oh. Oh,” Tony says. “It’s a gun.”

“An instrument gun?” Steve asks doubtfully.

“It’s like a gun disguised as a flute, or something,” Tony says. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s very screwy.”

“Screwy,” Steve mutters.

“Literally and in the slang way,” Tony specifies, his tone as saccharine as Seve’s ever heard.

“How is the security not seeing this?” Steve asks. “Don’t they have all the eyes you have?”

“That is a good question,” Tony says. “They’ve probably stalled the camera stream or something.” There’s a brief silence as he presumably goes to check. “Yeah,” he says when he comes back, “so they did some funky shit to the actual program which runs the display monitor, so the security’s just seeing loops of empty corridors. And before you ask, yes it means that my eyes are accurate and Rumlow really does have a flute gun, and no I won’t be able to fix whatever they’ve done without being in the same room as the machine cause I’m ninety percent sure they’ve stuck a jamming thing onto that other thing.”

“I completely understood that,” Steve says. He does, at least, get the general gist of Tony’s words.

“You understood about as much as you’d understand if I used the actual proper words,” Tony says. “Actually, you probably understood more. And now it looks like Rumlow’s heading backstage so I’m going to lose eyes on him.”

“Fuck,” Steve mutters. “Okay, where’s he coming in from?”

“Third floor,” Tony says. “I’m pretty sure he’s headed to the lighting jump.”

“The lighting jump,” Steve repeats as he tilts his head up. Sure enough, there’s a metal platform suspended in the air just behind the lights shining onto the stage, with a door on either side. “I see it. Which side?”

“The - um,” Tony says. “The side opposite from where the Prime Minister’s box is,” he settles on.

“I see it,” Steve says. The woman in the tower prop has just yanked at something inside the small enclosed area where she’s standing, and in the next instant there’s a telltale gleam of metal in her hands.

“So I think the woman has a gun too,” Steve reports. “From what I can tell it was hidden inside the tower set piece. Which doesn’t say good things about the reach of this organisation.”

“Fuck,” Tony mutters, as the man comes out onto the lighting jump and Steve presses himself into the curtains a little harder. For a moment Steve thinks that it’s just Tony’s way of expressing his frustration or worry at the reach of this organisation, but then he repeats himself, tone going increasingly frantic. “Fuck, fuck -”

“Tony?” Steve hisses, quieter than a breath.

“Okay, so I don’t know how much someone wants the Prime Minister dead, but I have eyes on a third agent,” Tony says.

Steve doesn’t want to run the risk of speaking, not now, but he needs some kind of clarification on this, so he tapps several times on his comms, and hopes that Tony’s able to read into it.

“I don’t know how you manage to make taps sound confused, but you succeeded,” Tony informs him, and then elaborates. “He looks like he’s headed for the control room. According to the cameras -” he breaks off for a moment, and Steve taps the comms again, angrily. “Yeah, he just kind of strolled in and knocked the guards out, I’m going to assume he’s a bad guy. He don’t give a fuck.”

Steve taps his comms again, distinctly unamused. A third agent seems like overkill, but it makes their job a lot harder.

“Fine, Jesus,” Tony says. “I’m going after him, you can handle the two on your end. And don’t even try to argue with me about this,” he adds, probably just to be annoying, since he knows Steve can’t talk. “Just cause I don’t like the field doesn’t mean I can’t handle it, and you’re pretty tied up over there -”

There’s a crash of cymbals in the background of Steve’s audio, and he takes the opportunity to hiss, “I wasn’t going to fucking argue,” in the quietest pissed-off voice he can manage.

“Liar,” Tony says, “you’re forgetting that I have been on the receiving end of a _large_ number of your attempts to do literally everything at once in a mission. It’s like you think I don’t even know you, jeez –”

“Fuck you,” Steve hisses.

“Fine, fine,” Tony says. “I’m going after him, comms open,” he reports, and Steve tunes him out in favour of sizing up the two agents he’s been left with. The backstage area is easy to hide in, but that makes it terribly easy to lose track of someone you’re trying to follow, especially when that someone is two people.

The woman is safely ensconced in the top of the tower set piece and doesn’t look to be moving anytime soon; Rumlow is balanced on the lighting jump, having assembled an instrument gun while Steve was occupied that is just as screwy as Tony had promised.

He doesn’t trust the woman as far as he can throw her, and he seriously doubts that she’d ever let him get close enough to get that far; still, he trusts her more than he trusts Rumlow. It’s entirely possible that she’s baiting him with Bucky, but Steve’s not going to take that chance, of course he’s not. So: up to the lighting jump it is. Steve looks up at the row of, in his opinion, far too narrow panels that run behind the stage lights and tries not to admit to any trepidation. It doesn’t really work, but he heads to the staircase Rumlow’s facing away from anyway.

He pulls his own body inwards in a motion that is probably too practiced - it’s what he’d spent basically the entire month doing after the serum, unused to his new large awkward body - and moves up the metal stairs carefully. It’s a spiraling steep metal contraption that no doubt saves a lot of space, something he could find on the outside of an old Brooklyn apartment building, which means it’s good for nostalgia value but decidedly bad for covert operations. Every step he takes needs to be the softest thing he’s ever done or else the whole structure’s going to start juddering and shaking and generally doing an excellent job of giving him away.

Once he reaches the top of the staircase he looks back down to see the redheaded woman definitely handling a long range gun she hadn’t had before, which: what the fuck, he took his eyes off her for _two seconds_.

Up close, the flute-rifle thing that Rumlow’s handling is ingenious; for what Steve’s knowledge of musical instruments is worth it’s startlingly convincing even in gun form. Now that Steve is close enough to see the case that Rumlow has next to him, he can see that the other man has four shells nestled inside the case in a space that looks made for five shells. Presumably, one is inside the gun, and that could be because the gun can only hold one bullet at a time, because Rumlow’s the kind of overconfident asshole who takes the chance of a one-shot kill for granted, or because he knows he has two separate people to back him up if he fails.

Rumlow’s movements are the same smooth, measured, and practiced type that Steve sees all the damn time in friends, acquaintances, and enemies alike. It says a lot about the kind of people Steve surrounds himself with.

Both of the assassins are still preparing their weapons; onstage, the princess is begging her father not to force her to marry the unknown prince. Steve still has a few minutes before the next scene change.

Rumlow starts to flip through what looks like a score for a flute part, a furrow in his forehead. The paper makes quiet noises as he flicks through the pages. Steve takes the opportunity to lever himself from the staircase to the lighting jump and crawl forward painstakingly slowly.

Ultimately, flat on his stomach is not a position conducive to knocking other people off high places, no matter how safe or secure it feels. Steve gives himself one more moment of shivering anxiety before he shoves it all into a little ball and pushes it to the back of his mind. Slowly, gently, he gathers his legs underneath him and begins to push himself up into a crouching position. He takes a deep breath, letting stale air fill his lungs, and on the next beat he throws himself forward.

He lands pretty much on top of Rumlow, and the other man, taken by surprise, only gets a single startled attempt at a punch in before Steve’s momentum is rolling them over each other and perilously close to falling off the jump. There’s a loud clatter as the flute case falls off the jump, bullets clinking after it.

As the only thing near them which has the potential to act as a weapon, then, it’s no surprise that both of them try to grab the flute-rifle at the same time. Four hands land on the rifle almost at the same time, and both men end up pushing the rifle towards the other, in a contest where giving up means a solid hit to the throat and probably also a solid attempt at suffocation from there.

It’s an unexpectedly close contest, and within moments Steve’s hands are unnervingly sweaty, threatening to slip off the flute at the first sign of a wrong movement. Anyone should be having trouble handling the kind of force that Steve’s exerting now, but he can never put it past extremists to experiment on their own people. He doesn’t want to sound arrogant, but he knows exactly how much stronger the experimental serum made him and there’s no way that Rumlow, if he was an ordinary man, should be gaining an advantage.

Because that’s what’s happening; Rumlow’s bearing down on Steve, both of their arms trembling slightly.

It’s a sudden head movement from Rumlow that puts an end to the stalemate. Steve’s too focused on the contest for the rifle, and the impact to his head, accompanied by a sharp kick to the ankle, has him on his back. He has, at least, enough presence of mind to keep his grip on the rifle.

At this point it turns into the same kind of brutal strength contest that Steve had spent most of his time losing back at high school. Rumlow uses brute strength and gravity to try and force the rifle between them down onto Steve’s throat, and Steve has nothing more than his own strength to stop that from happening.

There’s a tiny camera on Rumlow’s lapel, and Steve can feel his mind go into overdrive as he tries to figure out who could be on the other end. Judging by the way Rumlow’s eyes flicker repeatedly from Steve’s right ear to his face and then back again, the other man is wondering the same thing.

Against his instincts and possibly also his better judgement, Steve lets the contest of strength go on than it strictly has to. He’s counting on the hope that after a point, Rumlow will relax; that once he believes Steve’s pinned down his mindset will shift to a settled, waiting one. It takes a while, but soon enough there’s a nearly imperceptible and almost certainly unconscious relaxation in Rumlow’s body, and that’s when Steve lashes out.

The rifle threatens to drop out of his hands altogether when he yanks it upwards, but Rumlow doesn’t expect the movement and his fingers do slip off the smooth silver finish. Steve manages to keep the rifle in his fingertips, and without a pause he swings it at Rumlow’s head once, twice, a third time, before scrambling backwards to disengage.

Rumlow manages to land a kick that sends the rifle flying behind Steve to balance precariously on the edge of the jump. Steve’s positive, now, that Rumlow’s somehow enhanced, because there’d been clear dents in the rifle where it’d contacted Rumlow’s head, but the man pushes himself up utterly steadily, pupils dilated normally and movements still smooth.

The two of them are too evenly matched, is the problem. Both of them have years of training and fieldwork under their belts, both of them are unnaturally strong, equally fast. The fight turns into nothing more than a stagnant exchange of blows where neither of them gain the upper hand. Rumlow’s winning, though, simply by virtue of keeping Steve occupied; below, the choir sings and the instrument plays and the unknown prince is offering the princess a deal. And, impossible to forget, the woman with a gun and a possible third party are both still on track to assassinate the Prime Minister.

The orchestra plays the lilting opening bars to Nessun Dorma, and needing to break the cycle, Steve lets the next blow to his chest topple him off his feet. He flies backwards for a brief, weightless moment before he crashes, pain and relief thrumming through his body, onto the platform behind him. He’s vulnerable then and knows it, has to scramble to his feet while Rumlow capitalises on this opportunity by bringing out a knife he previously hadn’t been able to access.

With a quick apology to the theatre company, Steve grabs onto the curtains next to him and yanks them across his chest as Rumlow stabs. It doesn’t work as well as his shield would, but Steve’s able to sweep the caught knife aside before Rumlow can figure out whether he wants to disengage or hold on to his tangled weapon. He loses his grip on the handle and Steve capitalises, grabs the knife himself where it’s still stuck in the curtain and lunges forward, uses his whole body weight to drive the knife into Rumlow’s shoulder.

The two of them overbalance under the force of Steve’s movement, and teeter alarmingly on the edge of the jump. Steve’s torn between pushing and pulling, uncertain about the risk of himself falling along with Rumlow, but he’s never had great impulse control during fights so it’s only an instant of deliberation before he raises his leg and kicks, putting all his weight behind the blow.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Rumlow half-shouts. He flails for balance, but that ultimately ends up hurting him more, because the knife’s still embedded in his shoulder and the curtain is still tangled in the knife. Steve takes the opportunity to land a few more blows, and then Rumlow does fall, good arm still windmilling. The curtain rips loudly as he falls, and then the metal bar that it’s supported on comes loose and plunges down onto the ground below.

It takes a few seconds for the impact to be heard. When Steve peers out over the jump Rumlow isn’t moving. He’s landed almost exactly where the tower set piece had been, and Steve realises with a sense of vague horror that it’s moved forward, that the woman is now on stage, with a gun, in the perfect position to make a clean shot.

Once the frantic beating of his heart recedes slightly from his hearing, Steve can hear that the unknown prince is about halfway through Nessun Dorma. The sheet music was mussed and stepped on in the fight, but when Steve picks it up it’s open to the right page, and he can see the only annotation on the music: a helpful circle around the final sustained note of the current song, with _Vin-ce-ro!_ beneath it. Technically, the little circle is something that any musician might do if they wanted to put particular emphasis on a note, but there are no other annotations on any of the pages that survived the fight.

“Hello?” he asks quietly, when he remembers that he has an earpiece in and that there hasn’t been any sound from it for a while. “Tony, do you copy?”

He has less luck with the earpiece than he had with the music. No matter how many times he taps it, or mutters the various stupid code phrases that Tony’s programmed into the equipment, it stubbornly refuses to emit or transmit any sort of sound. When he glances anxiously at the control room, there’s definitely a figure in the room, but the hall is massive and the control room is far away enough from backstage to make it difficult to make out details.

When his focus returns to his immediate surroundings, for one gut-lurching moment he thinks he’s lost the rifle somewhere during the fight, or kicked it off the platform or something. But no, it’s still at the end of the platform, still balanced in a somewhat precarious position, and still slightly dented. Steve doesn’t think he’s ever been so glad to see a piece of weaponry in his life. More accurately, he doesn’t think he’s ever been so glad to have a scope.

It takes him a surprisingly short amount of time to acquaint himself with the gun, because the only truly confusing part about it is the flute casing, and in moments Steve has his eye pressed to the scope of the rifle as he tries to get a handle on the situation.

The woman has her rifle propped up on a bent knee, and is definitely aiming it in the direction of the Prime Minister. The man in the control booth definitely is not a worker at the opera. He’s in full combat gear, a mask, and goggles, and possibly most telling, he’s comfortably carrying and aiming yet another rifle in gloved hands. His stance is relaxed and calm, which means that Tony is either completely in the wrong area or that the guy has dealt with whatever threats he might have faced.

“Fuck, Tony?” Steve mutters uselessly into his comms.

Like most situations where Steve’s outnumbered, it’s a shitty one. He’s got two enemy agents with guns pointed at a Prime Minister and his backup is either lost or out for the count.

Steve isn’t registering words any more, only hearing notes grow higher, more intense, in preparation for a finale. He has no idea where to shoot. He aims at the masked man and then swings around to sight the woman, reluctant to pull the trigger on either of them because the other would probably notice, and continue their mission. And, Steve remembers, he only has one bullet. He swings the rifle around again, thoughts vacillating desperately. The tenor’s voice swings high and Steve swings around as well.

With the dents in it, trying to shoot anything at all is a risky move, but before the tenor can finish his first high note, before the other two snipers in the room try to make a move, Steve sights, aims, and shoots the Prime Minister himself. He’s almost, almost certain that the bullet catches her in the shoulder, in the glimpse he catches of her as she falls off her seat. The same instant he lets out a gusty sigh of relief, a second bullet tears through the stuffing of the chair, spilling white over red.

The balcony vacates incredibly quickly; the tenor cuts off his final note. The audience stand and start to clap, oblivious to the drama unfolding above them.

The masked man, when Steve looks at him again through the rifle scope, looks around confusedly for the source of the shot. When Steve swings his gaze back to the woman she turns to look at him at nearly the same time. It’s instinct that makes him scramble back to the staircase and temporary safety, and judging by the three shots she fires at him he’s making the right decision.

But she missed all three shots, and she’d known Bucky’s name, so against his better judgement Steve waits at the top of the staircase for her. She clambers out of the tower, somehow manipulating her body into fitting through spaces Steve would’ve sworn were too small to fit a child through, and then leaps for the curtains and scales them to bring herself up towards Steve in quick, efficient movements.

She just has time to grab the stretches of rope intended to keep the curtains back and swings them over her shoulder before Steve approaches. “Please,” he can’t help but say. “I - Bucky.”

Guards begin to filter through the audience below. A man in a suit comes onstage and waves his hands apologetically at the audience and orchestra.

“Follow me,” the woman says. Without a pause, she slides past him and through the door at Steve’s back. He doesn’t even hesitate before obeying.

The halls are still empty as the two of them run through the building, and the woman’s effortless twists and turns through the corridors have Steve lost in a matter of moments. For all the distance between the lighting jump and the control booth that Steve had been bemoaning earlier they arrive at a door marked CONTROL BOOTH incredibly quickly. The woman opens it without a sign of hesitation and snaps out something in Russian.

The masked man still has his gun in his hands as he turns around to acknowledge the woman. It seems like something in his body goes still when he sees her in the doorway, but he was remarkably still in the first place and almost all of his face is covered, so Steve isn’t really in the place to make judgements. The woman says something else - Steve _really_ needs to learn Russian, fuck - and the man nods, puts his gun down.

He moves towards them, and when his body no longer blocks Steve’s line of sight he can see Tony on the ground. It barely takes a second before Steve sees that while Tony’s eyes are closed his chest is still moving, but that moment stretches out for far too long.

“Shit,” Steve mutters, and hurries over to Tony’s slumped figure. There’s a sizeable lump on his head that probably spells a concussion and a rather spectacular bruise, later. Fuck, Steve shouldn’t have brought him here.

“One of yours?” the woman asks as Steve hefts Tony into a fireman’s carry.

“My teammate,” Steve replies. The woman nods, and sets a slightly less punishing than before in respect of the body that Steve’s carrying. “You said -” Steve manages to pant out once they reach the top of the stairs and spill out onto the roof. “Bucky -” He feels like a broken record.

The masked man turns to look at him, then. He’s still wearing goggles so the expression on his face isn’t easily readable, but something about Steve’s words had caught his attention. “Bucky,” he murmurs, seemingly to himself.

The woman finishes using one of the lengths of rope to tie the door shut. “His death was faked,” she says once she’s tugged at the handle and satisfied herself. “That is some of what my organisation does. Sometimes the agents are part of the plan, sometimes they are not.”

“Where -” Steve starts to ask, but he’s interrupted by Tony stirring on his shoulder and groaning, “What the fuck,” in a profoundly annoyed sort of voice.

The woman takes off the high heels she’s been running in and passes them to Tony, who says, “What the fuck,” again, but seems happy to hold them while being held himself.

“Come on,” the woman says, and leads them to the edge of the roof. Steve, carrying all of Tony’s weight, nearly overbalances, and the woman grabs his elbow at the same time the masked man grabs his shirt to steady him.

“Fuck, don’t drop me,” Tony murmurs, because he now has a perfect view off the edge of of the building.

“Can you make the jump?” the woman asks, gesturing downwards even as she secures her second length of rope to a flagpole and lets it drop to the ground.

“Yes,” Steve says, and the woman nods, all business.

“Good,” she says. “You make the jump with him -” she says, nodding at the masked man. “I will take that man and use the rope.”

“Can you -” Steve begins to ask, and has to cut himself off as the woman manages to slide Tony from Steve’s grip and heft him onto her shoulder.

“Yes,” she says, and wraps her skirt around her hands before she fits them over the rope.

“Alright,” Steve says, slightly uneasy as he looks at the man next to him. The woman says something to the masked man, and he nods, begins taking off his combat gear.

Someone tries to open the door and finds that they cannot. There are shouts from inside, and the woman wastes no more time in lining herself up with the rope.

“What, what the _fuck_ ,” Tony repeats, a little more clear-headed now that he’s faced with a many-foot drop with only a flagpole to hold his weight. The woman shifts his around so that he’s clinging to her back.

“Don’t let go,” she says to him sternly, and swings herself out into open air.

The masked man, now devoid of the tac gear which lies in a pile next to him except for his mask and a glove on his left hand, takes off his goggles and looks at Steve with eyes that take his breath away. Steve opens his mouth to say something, anything, but the door makes an alarming cracking noise under the barrage of blows. They look at each other once more and, without another word, jump.

Steve’s made jumping without a parachute something of a habit, much to the annoyance of basically everyone around him, but there’s still something terrifying in the long weightless moments where he has nothing to do except wait to hit the ground. They overtake Tony and the woman in midair, and Tony’s regained enough awareness to be clutching her tightly and yelling something along the lines of, “What the _fuck_ , I’m going to _die_.”

The masked man folds into a neat roll when he hits the ground. Steve only has to bend his knees and let the impact of the landing shake through his bones for a second. The woman clutches at the rope sharply to slow down her fall just before she hits the ground.

“He and I will get a car,” the woman says, and folds her hand neatly into Tony’s elbow. Tony looks utterly speechless, and it is possibly the first time that Steve has seen him lost for words. Behind them, the flagpole gives out and plummets to the ground with a crash.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea -” Tony starts, just in time to be dragged away.

“I think,” the masked man says. “I think I know you.” He pulls Steve further into the crowd that’s gathered outside the building, and those eyes - it’s evening and dark and people are milling around but Steve is ready to swear that he knows those eyes, that voice. He wants - he doesn’t know what he wants, except that’s a lie, he desperately wants this man to be Bucky, and it’s far too late to tell himself to stop hoping. He’s been hoping ever since the woman had asked that question.

“Take off your mask?” he asks, trying not to let his voice tremble. One bare hand and one gloved one reach up to pull off the mask, and it feels like the moment stretches out forever, that Steve will be stuck here holding his breath until the world ends. The beating of his heart is almost painful against his ribcage.

Finally, finally, the mask comes free and _oh_ , yes, that’s Bucky looking back at him, older and worn but undeniably _him_. Steve’s heart feels like it’s cracked open and bleeding as he just stands there and looks his fill. He’s a little dizzy and a little lightheaded, and - it must be a dream, some kind of hallucination. The warmth spreading through his blood is too good to be true. But Bucky’s looking back at him, like he’s just realising that he’s been starved, and surely no dream has any right to look that yearning.

“I thought you were smaller,” Bucky murmurs. His hand comes out to touch the line of Steve’s elbow, and Steve’s not even a little embarrassed of the way his whole body leans towards Bucky.

“I was,” he says, hardly louder than a whisper. “It’s a long story. I thought -”

He doesn’t know what to say, how to say it. He’d dreamed of this for so long and then he’d forced those dreams out of his head. He wants to laugh and cry and throw himself at Bucky. His skin feels like it’s going to crack under the swelling of his heart.

“I missed you,” he says, after whole seconds tick by where he can’t find words to speak. His voice is so quiet that it’s nearly lost in the buzzing crowd, but Bucky’s face softens and he sways forward a little.

“I -” he starts, but behind Steve there’s the unmistakable noise of an explosion. Bucky’s voice cuts off, and his face goes blank as it’s painted in orange and red light.

“Was that -” Steve starts, and when he turns around he can make out the skeleton of a burning state car even as the crowd around him screams. Half of them surge backwards, away from the still-burning wreck, and the other half rush forward in concern.

“Insurance,” Bucky says, and Steve never wants to see his face this empty or bleak again. “I think - I think I -” he starts, but is cut off again when another car pulls up to the curb.

Tony and the woman both lean out and yell variations of, “Get in!” For once, Tony’s version is the less vulgar one, and he stares incredulously at the woman as Steve and Bucky both move towards the car.

Tony holds his hands out from the driver’s seat as they get into the car. “Whoa, whoa, not him,” he yelps. “He tried to kill me!”

“I did not,” Bucky says. “I knocked you out.”

“Put your hands back on the wheel,” Steve says, and in traditional Tony fashion, Tony puts one hand on the wheel and uses the other to gesticulate.

“Even if he didn’t kill me he was definitely going to kill _someone_ , or was that fucking Remington just a decoration?”

“It doesn’t make him a bad person,” Steve says staunchly, despite knowing little to nothing about the situation except that Bucky’d been involved. Bucky gives him a cautious sort of look, though, and the woman looks vaguely approving. There’d been a lot of wrong things to say, just then, he knew that, but that probably wasn’t been one of them.

“Wait, hang on, d’you mean to say you know him?” Tony asks incredulously, twisting around to glare. “What the fuck? Is he the bait?”

“Bait?” the woman repeats, voice gone quiet and dangerous.

“I couldn’t rule out the possibility you were baiting me,” Steve says, and she seems to relax.

“You need to let me go,” she says then.

“I can’t - what, you want to go back to them _again_?” Steve asks incredulously, and she tips her chin up.

“Again?” Bucky asks, and turns to look at her. “You mean you could’ve -”

“I couldn’t have,” the woman says, a little too sharply, “and you know very well why not.” Bucky frowns and tilts his head, as though he doesn’t, in fact, know, and the woman sighs, sadness in the weighed-down lines of her body. “Sorry,” she murmurs. “You’ll remember, though, after a while. You always have, at least.”

“Okay,” Bucky says cautiously.

“I assumed you were deep cover back in Brooklyn, but don’t you think this is taking it a little far?” Steve asks her. He wants to put a hand on Bucky’s wrist but he doesn’t want to weigh the other man down, doesn’t want him to feel trapped. He keeps his hands to himself.

The woman shrugs, and brings out a tube of lipstick. “After letting you escape I needed a way to gain back trust,” she says. “This was a way to do it.”

“That’s not a good excuse!” Tony half-yells from the front. “Also, we haven’t been introduced,” he says pointedly.

“Natasha Romanoff,” she says helpfully. “And you’re Tony Stark and Steve Rogers.”

“Well, yes,” Tony says. “Congratulations.”

“We have a tail,” Bucky says from where he’s pressed against the door. A moment later, white lights shine through the rear window.

“Why did you let me go?” Steve asks. “Why are you letting him go?” There’s a strange kind of silence in the car, broken by the popping noise of gunfire and the noise of cars on old roads.

“He helped me, once,” Natasha says. “When I was in a similar kind of trouble as he is now. And - I have never claimed much of a conscience,” she continues slowly, “but even I can tell that what they do to him is not right.”

Steve and Bucky glance at each other, uneasy, and for a moment all Steve can think about is how often they used to do that before Steve launched them into another fight. In a tight voice Tony says, “They’re closing in. D’you want me to lose them or not?”

“It has to look like an escape,” Natasha says, as the first bullets bounce off the car they’re in.

“Fuck!” Tony yelps. His violent swerve to avoid the next round of bullets throws Steve against Bucky. He holds his breath as he gets up, but Bucky doesn’t seem to mind, just watches him carefully. “Change of plan! Throw her out!”

“Thank you,” Bucky says, ducking from the bullets shattering the window. His head lands on Steve’s spine, and for a moment all Steve can concentrate on is that press, flesh against cloth. Natasha gives them that same thin smile she’d given Steve when she’d first backed away from him in a darkened corridor in Brooklyn.

“You can owe me one, if you feel like it,” Natasha says with a smile that’s more like a smirk, and then she opens the car door and throws herself out. The sound of gunfire stops abruptly; before Tony can turn the next corner Steve cranes his neck to see her sitting up, a ferocious glare focused on the men approaching her.

The battered car has the decency to wait until Tony’s driven it a few streets down before the engine sputters threateningly. Tony swears and yanks the car over to the side of the road just in time for it to give out. “Alright, I’m going to need some clarification here,” he says.

“My base’s only two streets away,” Steve says.

“No, that’s not - I mean, that’s helpful, but that’s not what I wanted clarification for,” Tony says. Steve stares at him, and after a few uncomfortable seconds pass Tony throws his hands up in the air. “Him? The elephant in the room?” he asks, pointing at Bucky, who flinches away. “You’re acting like you know him, when, in case we forgot, he _he tried to kill me_ back at the opera!”

“I knocked you out,” Bucky says.

Tony aims a distinctly unimpressed look at him, and upon spotting the way Steve is very gently holding Bucky’s knuckles, frowns harder. Steve tenses when Bucky does, because he doesn’t want the other man to pull his hand away, but then their eyes meet and they just start looking at each other. Steve still can’t quite believe that this is real, that the opera happened and he has Bucky beside him again. The street is dark and empty, which should be a good thing, but all Steve wants in that moment is a little more light to illuminate the face in front of him

“Okay,” Tony says, “you definitely know this guy. What did you mean when you said the bait was worth it? Steve? Cap?”

“I - this is Bucky,” Steve says. “James Barnes.”

“You had me search his name once,” Tony says promptly. “And then you made me swear I wouldn’t tell anyone the name.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, a little cagey and a little distracted.

“Okay,” Tony says, and apparently gives the line of questioning up as a lost cause. “Anyway, we need to get to the safehouse? The safehouse, Cap?”

“Right,” Steve says vaguely, only half-registering Tony’s words. Bucky looks down, a tiny smile playing at the corner of his mouth, and Steve can’t even mind that Bucky’s probably laughing at him. He wants to kiss the laughter off Bucky’s lips.

“Safehouse?” Tony repeats even louder, and successfully manages to jolt Steve at least partially out of the haze he’s in.

“Yeah,” he says finally, once he turns back towards Tony. “Two streets away, Flat C on the 14th floor of the Vija apartment block.”

Tony grabs his free arm and starts tugging, obviously not trusting Steve to ever start moving if left to his own devices. Steve would be offended, but he has to admit that the assessment is not entirely unfair. Bucky trails along, right hand still tangled gently with Steve’s, though, so Steve’s pretty happy with the situation.

Aside from the occasional complaining mutter from Tony, the walk to the apartment building is spent in silence. Steve just looks his fill, half-afraid that if he takes his eyes off Bucky he’s going to wake up to discover that Rumlow’d knocked him out during their fight or he’d fallen asleep too late last night and this is a strange longing fever-dream.

Bucky doesn’t seem to mind Steve’s gaze on him - if he even begins to look like he might mind Steve’d take his eyes off the other man in an instant, dream or no dream - and even starts looking back, those gorgeous blue eyes meeting Steve’s gaze for drawn-out spun-sugar moments before they flicker back down to the ground. Steve isn’t aware of the smile that’s spreading across his own face but he can’t help but to notice Bucky’s responding smile, a small shy thing where the corners of his mouth just start to play upwards and oh, fuck, Steve is still so, so gone. He swears he can feel his heart ache with it.

Tony nearly drags them past the old and decrepit apartment building that is their destination. It takes Steve nearly the length of another building to realise that they’ve gone right past Vija Apartments, and he has to tug at Tony several times before the other man stops.

“Tony, Tony, we’re here, this is it,” Steve says, and winces internally as Tony casts an extremely judgemental gaze towards the admittedly rather dilapidated building.

“If you say so,” Tony says, very doubtfully. “That door looks like it’s going to fall off if I touch it,” he says before grasping the handle and pushing.

The lobby is dark and deserted. Dust seems to have gathered on every available surface, and even some that Steve would’ve classified as unavailable. It looks like the set of a bad horror film, complete with small bits of cheap plaster from the ceiling on the cracked floor. Steve looks towards Bucky again, a little concerned about the other man’s reaction to an admittedly foreboding place. Bucky’s face is blank, though he does offer Steve’s fingers a gentle squeeze, and Steve has to stop himself from wondering what other dark and deserted places Bucky’s been forced to get used to.

“I cannot _believe_ ,” Tony says, and then pauses to reconsider as his voice bounces off the walls. “Actually, no, scratch that, I can totally believe you’d stay in this shithouse.”

“I needed a base, not luxury accomodation,” Steve protests. “Here, elevator’s this way.”

“Oh god, no, it’s going to be some sort of nightmare contraption,” Tony protests, but follows obediently. His protests begin in earnest when Steve stops in front of the elevator and opens the old iron grille that acts as a door.

“Not coming?” Steve asks, when the sight of the elevator seems to render Tony speechless.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Tony says. “That’s not an elevator! That’s a death trap! That thing is not structurally sound,” he insists.

“It’s fine,” Steve says. He’s enjoying the look of apoplectic horror on Tony’s face probably more than is kind. “I’ve been using it for days.”

“You’re the worst, I swear to God,” Tony says, and spends the entire trip upwards clutching at the wall and muttering dire things about their imminent deaths while the elevator, despite being inanimate, manages to convey its displeasure at having to carry the weight of three fully-grown men rather eloquently through various creaks, shrieks, and groans.

The flat that Steve chose - after long and careful consideration, mostly because it contained the most intact ceiling and the fewest rats - greets them with silence as they come in through the corridor. Tony and Bucky are also silent as they look around upon entering the room.

“I’d almost prefer the elevator to this,” Tony says finally. “At least in there I could contemplate structural and physical impossibilities. _Why_ does nobody live here?”

“It’s condemned,” Steve says, and when Tony gapes in astonishment he rolls his eyes. “I needed a cheap place to stay, Jesus.”

“It’s not that bad,” Bucky says quietly, and nudges Steve’s side. “Reminds me of our first flat,” he offers. Steve stares at him in astonishment, and once he starts laughing it quickly becomes impossible to stop.

“I’m seriously so done,” Tony groans, when Bucky’s hesitant laughter joins Steve’s undignified cackles. “Steve!” Tony exclaims, and jabs the man he’s yelling at between the ribs.

“Ow, fuck, Tony, what?” Steve groans.

“You! Him!” Tony half-yells. He looks like he’s going out of his mind with how much he knows he doesn’t know. Tony has never handled being kept in the dark well.

“What?” Steve asks innocently, because it’s his duty to work Tony up as much as possible at all times. Tony doesn’t disappoint, his face flushing so violently that it’s clearly visible even through the dim moonlight that filters through the dusty windows.

“I think he wants to know how you know me,” Bucky says, voice still soft.

“ _Thank_ you,” Tony says. “I was starting to think I was speaking another goddamn language.”

“Like you could ever learn another language,” Steve says. “But, um, me and Bucky, we were - childhood friends.”

“Childhood friends,” Tony repeats, voice utterly deadpan.

“Also adulthood friends,” Steve admits. When he sneaks a glance out of the corner of his eye Bucky is frowning slightly, and he has no idea whether that’s a good sign or a bad sign. For a small selfish moment he wants to keep their more-than-friendship to himself. The last thing that Bucky needs is to feel pressured into resuming a romantic relationship, especially if he hasn’t been treated well, in the past three years.

But he deserves to know, and so does Tony, when it is something this big, and with this much of an effect on Steve. He thinks he would do anything to make Bucky happy. “And, uh, in the interest of full disclosure, we were, um, more than friends as well…”

He trails off a little pathetically at this point, partly because he has no idea what to say but mostly because Bucky’s doing that tiny smiling thing again and he’s so beautiful when he smiles even this much that it makes Steve’s heart ache.

“So the guy you made me stalk via military databases was not related to the case you said he was,” Tony says, and Steve winces.

“Yes?”

“You could’ve told me,” Tony says, and only someone who’d known him for years could’ve noticed the hurt running through his voice.

“It wasn’t you. I don’t - it would’ve made it too real,” Steve says. He doesn’t mean for his voice to display all the cracked-open parts of him, but Tony softens. “It just hurt,” he finishes. “To talk about someone I thought was dead. And then - if he hadn’t been there. It hurt.”

“’M sorry,” Bucky murmurs, and Steve is shaking his head before the sentence is finished.

“Not your fault, Buck.”

“So how did you end up with our favourite underground terrorist group?” Tony asks, somehow combative and harmlessly curious at the same time. The _it might be his fault, we don’t know yet_ is implied in the words, if not his tone. Steve wants to glare at him for the way that Bucky’s shoulders tighten, but this is something they need to hear, no matter how sure Steve is that Bucky was coerced.

“I don’t remember,” Bucky murmurs. “I have older memories. Our first flat. After joining the army, it gets - fuzzy. Everything’s kind of hazy, right now.”

“That sucks,” Tony says, and even though he’s making a face and the comment is flippant he somehow sounds sincere. “Natasha said you’d remember, didn’t she?”

“She said I usually do,” Bucky says. “I hope she’s right.”

“Even if you don’t,” Steve says, “it’s not the end of the world. You’re not - you’re more than your memories.” Bucky turns to look at him, eyes softening, and after a few seconds of silence Tony clears his throat.

“Okay, so that’s gross,” he says. “In more important news, I’ve arranged to get us into a plane for the Tower in less than twenty if we hurry, chop chop.”

~*~

INTERLUDE  
LOCATION: SOKOVIA UTOPIA RESORT  
SOKOVIA, SOKOVIA

Natasha only gets through two of the assigned four knocks before the door twists open in front of her still-raised knuckles. When she sees that it is Rumlow standing in front of her she doesn’t bother to hide the twisting of her expression, and gives herself the opportunity to cast a visibly disparaging eye over his bruises, cuts, and arm in a cast. He looks exhausted, but manages to muster the energy to aim his token sneer back at her as they change places.

Schmidt sits behind his empty desk, and simply watches her dispassionately as the door closes. Zola, in the corner of the room, does not pause or even look up from his game of solitaire. There is an agent behind her, who closes the door as she steps though, and another behind Schmidt.

The man behind her pushes the small of her back once and then again as she makes her way towards Schmidt. She cannot afford to appear weak, so she turns sharply to plant a high-heeled foot on the agent’s knee, and use that leverage to wrap her legs around his neck and bring him heavily to the ground. She steals his gun as she stands, and holds it up in the same motion she holds her hands up. It is an unnecessary move but a sharp reminder of her skills, and Schmidt looks vaguely impressed.

The agent only notices that it is his gun she is holding after she has taken two steps forward, and checks his jacket pocket frantically as though it will appear there if he looks hard enough.

Gently, respectfully, she tilts her head at Schmidt, who merely tilts his own back as she approaches.

“We had an agreement,” she says, once it is clear that he is giving her the first word. “You send me to do a job, I do it. But my way, not yours. And you cannot keep things from me when I am in the field.”

“When did I deviate from those terms?” Schmidt asks. His voice is deceptively lilting and light, his hands utterly still on the shining wood of the desk.

“You sent Rumlow to the opera tonight,” she says. They both know that Rumlow, of all the operatives in the organisation, is the one most likely to be tasked with killing a fellow agent, particularly when he is placed on that agent’s mission without notice or consent. The look in Schmidt’s eyes is the closest to acknowledgement that Natasha will probably get from him, and so having made one true claim and been believed she makes a second claim, this one only half-true. “You didn’t inform me of the flaws in the Soldier’s programming.” Zola pauses, for a moment, and then lays a red four on a black five.

“Obviously, since you missed, you needed the backup,” Schmidt says. “And there are no flaws in the Soldier’s programming.”

“Then why did he abandon his mission as soon as he saw Steve Rogers?” Natasha asks, allowing her voice to go a little sharp. “Why did you send Rumlow to the opera when you knew Rogers would have been tracking him?”

“I underestimated Rogers and overestimated Rumlow,” Schmidt says, voice briefly cold. “I assumed he could apprehend Rogers.” The _I assumed you could apprehend Rogers_ is implied in the way he . “Clearly,” he says, and taps the table once, “I was wrong. Repeat what you said about the Soldier.”

“As soon as the Soldier caught sight of Rogers it was as though his programming had been rendered useless,” Natasha says. Her voice is steady and her eyes meet Schmidt’s cold gaze without flinching. “When Rogers made the non-fatal shot I looked first to the control room. His weapon was abandoned. When I made my escape the two of them ambushed me and ushered me into the car I later escaped from.”

“Did you not think to use the code phrases?” Schmidt asks. His composure begins to crack; he glares, briefly, at Zola in his corner, who pauses again, hands hovering over the cards.

“I did not have enough time to properly implant the code phrases,” Zola says to his table, clearly frustrated at having to repeat this. He has complained of it many times, but Schmidt has insisted that the Soldier be placed in the field as much and often as possible. Natasha knows for a fact that none of the code phrases work particularly well or reliably even when James had just come out of a session with Zola, although Zola continues to insist that with some months and more usage the words would have the effect of a bolt of lightning.

“The code phrases were the first thing I attempted to use,” Natasha says anyway, and allows the tiniest thread of contempt into her voice; too little and it would be seen as an unacceptably valid question, but too much and it would become disrespect.

“I did warn you,” Zola says from his corner, clutching a queen of spades. “Strong memories from his past, faces or places with strong memory associations -”

“You said you erased his memory,” Schmidt almost snarls, very clearly trying to keep his patience.

“I also said that it was not foolproof,” Zola says, and then continues passive-aggressively: “I needed more time with him for that, but he was needed for so many missions -”

“Nevertheless,” Schmidt says, cutting him off to turn back to Natasha. “This is the second time you have failed me with regards to Steve Rogers. Curious, no?”

This was dangerous ground. Natasha’d hoped to avoid it, especially when the two men had started talking to each other, but now she needed more than anything to be convincing.

“Are you questioning my loyalty or my ability?” she asks, narrow-eyed and still soft. She is viciously, viscerally aware of the gun in her hand and the inefficient grip she has on it.

Schmidt just tilts his head again. “Can’t decide.” She’s certain he already has decided; Johann Schmidt is a man who likes to play with his toys.

“I’ve told you before. Trust me, or kill me,” Natasha says, and internally holds her breath as she goes all out, bares her throat and hopes it will be enough to convince him of her submission. “But if you’re going to kill me, be a man.” She throws the gun on the table in front of him, pretends to be entirely impervious to the rattle it makes. “Do it yourself.”

For a few brief seconds, time seems to stretch; he picks up the gun, cocks and aims it towards her, and it feels like the space of a lifetime. She keeps her chin up, meets his eyes entirely honestly, and dares him to take the shot.

Then the sound of a gunshot echoes through the room and for a moment Natasha’s eyes widen, her body flinches back, because she’s sure that she’s made the wrong choice, provoked him too much, gone too far with her challenges and it’s over -

She doesn’t feel any pain. The man behind her falls to the ground with a thump. When Schmidt puts the gun away, she allows herself one look downwards at the edge of the desk, lowering her eyes in submission. He was HYDRA, had joined entirely honestly and freely, but he deserved better to spend his last minutes as a go-between threat and die as a warning by proxy.

Schmidt places the gun at the edge of the table, magazine towards her and muzzle towards himself. She wants to pick it up and shoot him. She refrains.

“Did he say anything?” Schmidt asks, rough voice still soft as he resettles himself in his chair.

“No,” Natasha says, and leaves it at that.

“Does he know anything?”

“I don’t see how he could,” Natasha says, truthfully. “Possibly about the Winter Soldier program, if the Soldier talks. Nothing else.”

“And your mission?”

“I leave for Morocco tomorrow,” Natasha says. Schmidt considers her, head tilted to the side like a bird.

“And you want no help in this.” He does not need to say that he disapproves of her choice.

“I’ve made sure that Rogers will find me,” Natasha says coolly. This is a lie, but it will be a useful one should anything go wrong.

Schmidt raises an eyebrow. “You plan on using him to get what you want?” Natasha inclines her head, and Schmidt’s lips thin. “A risky plan.”

“Fortune favours the bold,” Natasha points out.

Schmidt gives her a thin smile; that is one of his favourite sayings. “So it does.”


	3. Chapter 3

LOCATION: AN ABANDONED FIELD  
NIGHT, VIJA, SOKOVIA

Steve hadn’t even had time to protest before Tony bundled all three of them into the nearest car to drive out of the city and into an abandoned grassy field. In the distance the lights of Sokovia glitter brightly, but the field itself is lit only by moonlight, and it creates a strange sort of cognitive dissonance.

“I’m pretty sure this isn’t legal,” Steve says, as Happy brings the small quiet plane to a stop on the dark field in front of him.

“Mm,” Tony says. “It is on a few technicalities,” and hops up onto the steps that unfold from the inside of the plane with a wave of his hand.

Bucky, pressed against Steve from their shoulders to their waists, stays where he is until Steve moves forward, and then moves with him.

Tony’s plane is as lavish on the inside as it is plain on the outside. There’s couches and tables and fancy cabinets and poles that go from floor to ceiling for a purpose that Steve does not want to think about.

“ETA nine hours,” Tony says, once the plane has levelled out in the air and all three men are sitting down somewhat comfortably.

“You want anything? Food, sleep?” Steve asks Bucky. Tony mutters something about how Steve is never this nice to him.

“I,” Bucky says, and stops. In the bright lights inside the plane the dark circles under his eyes are shockingly heartbreakingly clear. “Sleep,” he says finally, but he doesn’t sound happy about it. His eyes dart between Tony and Steve.

“I’m going to my suite,” Tony says loudly, bless him. “Sleep’s a good idea, we’re going to be arriving in the morning.” In the instant that his back is to Bucky he signs a _be careful_ at Steve.

“We’ll be fine,” Steve says, and Tony rolls his eyes at the statement but leaves. Bucky’s eyes trail his figure as he leaves the main compartment, and something softens in his posture when the two of them are left alone.

“You want me to go?” Steve asks, when Bucky doesn’t open his mouth to speak. The other man looks grateful at the question but shakes his head. Something like alarm blossoms in his eyes when Steve stands.

“Just going to see where Tony keeps the blankets,” Steve says, and Bucky relaxes again. His gaze follows Steve around the room as he opens drawers and cupboards.

“That’s a lot of blankets,” he says when Steve returns. It is possible that Steve had been a little hasty in simply grabbed all the blankets he could find, but he doesn’t think he can be blamed for wanting to get back to Bucky.

“Is that okay?” Steve asks, mind suddenly full of the ways this could make Bucky feel trapped or held down or overheated -

“Yeah,” Bucky says, and reaches out to tug a blanket down, somehow managing to wrap it around himself without getting up.

Steve dumps the rest of the blankets next to Bucky and goes to turn the light down. “Okay?” he asks, when the plane is only illuminated by moonlight.

“Yeah,” Bucky says again.

Steve isn’t expecting anything when he goes back over to the couch, movements even more careful in the darkness. It’s massive, big enough to be a bed for four. There is plenty of space for Bucky to roll around all night without touching Steve, and Steve doesn’t mind that, he truly doesn’t. It’s enough that he’s allowed to be near Bucky, that Bucky trusts him enough to fall asleep when Steve is present.

When Steve has stilled, there is a warm pressure on one side of his stomach. It takes him a moment to realise that the warmth isn’t him, and then he can’t help the way he tenses. By the time he looks down, the warmth has moved away. If he was less sleep-relaxed he probably would have thought more about what he was doing, but as it is he simply puts a gentle hand on Bucky’s cheek, encourages him to move close again. Bucky’s light eyes look liquid in the starshine as he resettles, slow and careful like he’s afraid he’s going to have to move away again.

“Okay?” Steve asks, and Bucky nods, presses his head slightly more against the side of Steve’s stomach.

It’s probably about time for Steve to move his hand away, to keep letting Bucky choose what and when and how they touch, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Bucky’s still watching him with those wide liquid eyes, utterly still. It is probably cheating for Steve to use his old knowledge of Bucky, but he’s only human, whatever Howard and Erskine might have said, so he lets his hand slide up and into Bucky’s hair, lets himself card through the strands gently.

He swears he can hear Bucky - sigh, or purr, or _something_ , and it’s an astonishing thing to watch him relax under Steve’s hand. Astonishing and heartbreaking and so, so gorgeous. Steve is so glad to be trusted like this he feels his heart might burst, feels like just touching Bucky is sending warmth through his own body, racing from his fingertips to his heart.

“’S good,” Bucky murmurs, so quiet that it would have been lost to the sound of engines if Steve wasn’t so attuned to his voice, hanging on every word he says.

“Good,” he replies, just as soft, fingers still knuckle-deep in raven-dark hair. “Sleep well, Buck.”

Sometime in between gentle strokes of Bucky’s hair Steve must fall asleep, as much as he wants to stay awake to bask in Bucky’s presence, because the next time he opens his eyes sunlight is streaming through the plane windows and Happy’s voice in the intercom is in the middle of saying something about weather conditions. The warm weight against his stomach keeps him floating in vague sleep-space for a while longer than usual, so that he’s drifting awake slowly for once.

“I remember you more,” Bucky’s voice says from his stomach, where he’s apparently stayed all night. He’s relaxed and soft beneath layers of softness. “You and - Becca? Did I - did she -”

“Your sister,” Steve supplies.

“Yeah,” Bucky says on a sigh. “She still -?”

“She finished her degree,” Steve says. “Works at a firm and everything. She’s still in Brooklyn,” he adds, but carefully doesn’t mention anything more.

“You were definitely smaller,” Bucky says. Steve can feel his face flush.

“Yeah, uh,” he says. “That’s a long story.”

He can tell Bucky wants to say _we have time_ , but the plane is in a steep decline towards ground and they both hear Tony yell “Fuck!” as he probably falls out of bed or something equally ridiculous.

“Glad to see you’re still alive,” Tony says when he comes into the room with two blankets wrapped around him like robes. “ _Someone’s_ piloting leaves a lot to be desired,” he adds, glaring into the nearest camera.

“I gave thirty, twenty, ten, and five minute warnings to your suite,” Happy says from over the intercom, managing to sound entirely blameless while negotiating the plane onto its landing pad. That feat likely comes of actually being blameless, but it’s impressive nonetheless.

Tony mutters something probably uncomplimentary under his breath and goes to open the alcohol cabinet.

“Any new developments in the night?” he asks, once he has a glass of mimosa in his hand.

Bucky looks at Steve for an instant. Steve would almost think that he’s looking for cues, but he looks away too quickly for Steve to have signalled anything.

“I remembered more,” he offers.

“After sleeping?” Tony asks, and then frowns when Bucky nods. “I’m not a biologist, we need Bruce.”

“What for?” Bucky asks. His relaxation had disappeared when he’d sat up on the couch at Tony’s arrival, but at this statement he was actively tense.

“Give you a check-up,” Tony says, tone deliberately light even as his face falls into wary lines. “We don’t know what went on where he was, and Bruce has, like, six medical degrees.”

Bucky’s body language is not promising, to say the least. Steve reaches out, gentle, to place a hand on his shoulder, and instead of moving away Bucky’s head drops.

“Alright,” he says, and doesn’t say another word until the three of them are ensconced in the lift with floor numbers decreasing rapidly in front of them, at which point JARVIS is the one to initiate a conversation.

“Sir, if I may,” he says, “I have identified a data-carrying object in Captain Rogers’s hems.”

“My whats?” he asks reflexively, even as he twists his legs to look at the hems of his trousers. “That’s JARVIS,” he adds, because Bucky has tensed up at the intruding voice. “Tony’s - ah, AI? Artificial intelligence? JARVIS’s nice,” he adds, “a lot nicer than Tony, I don’t know where he gets it from.”

“Why thank you, Captain,” JARVIS says, sounding pleased. Tony looks utterly outraged, and Bucky cracks a smile at that. When Steve digs the offending object out of his hems it’s the same metallic tube that Natasha had used to apply her lipstick.

“That’s Natasha’s,” Bucky says.

“It’s…” Tony trails off as he takes the tube and starts to fiddle with it. It only takes him around ten floors to complete the statement. “It’s a thumbdrive,” he says, having taken all of the lipstick out of the tube and found the aforementioned thumbdrive in a thin plastic casing.

“That’s what JARVIS said,” Steve points out. The elevator dings and the door opens at Bruce’s floor, which has been overhauled completely to contain a lab Steve’s quite sure hadn’t been readily available on a living floor before.

“Bruce!” Tony calls out.

“What if he’s sleeping? It’s still morning,” Steve says, and Tony just waves a hand.

“Scientists are always ready to wake up in the name of science,” he says.

Bucky shifts uneasily and holds his left arm out to Steve. “I,” he says. “Don’t, um, remember how it got there, but,” he cuts himself off again to take a breath, forehead wrinkled in frustration. “It’s metal.”

“What -” Tony starts, and with a grimace Bucky pulls off his glove.

“Metal,” he says. And, indeed, the hand presented to Tony’s astonished face and Steve’s blank one appears to be completely made of metal.

Tony makes an incomprehensible high noise that is presumably borne of excitement, and makes grabby hands at the arm until he catches sight of Steve’s glare, at which point he retracts his hands and settles for staring longingly at the shining metal of the hand.

“Please,” he says, unselfconscious and honest for all that Steve can see the excitement under his skin. “Let me look at that. Schematics, mechanics -”

“Um,” Bucky says. He has a startled look on his face which says a lot about what he thought the reaction to his arm would be, and Steve pushes himself into Bucky’s side a little more firmly, at that. “I mean, if you want. You can.”

Tony looks like all his Christmases have come at once. “Bruce!” he yells again, about twice as loud, and marches off to collect his unfortunate friend.

“Will you stay?” Bucky asks as he steps out of the elevator, somewhat more hesitantly.

“Of course,” Steve says, and then adds, “If that’s what you want.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, and his non-metal hands finds one of Steve’s and holds it while Bruce does his thing and Tony has paroxysms of joy at the scans that JARVIS returns on the metal arm.

“The engineering!” he half-yells, even though everybody in the room is very definitely within earshot. “I’m so pissed I didn’t think of this! This is going to send prosthetic technology _into the future_ ,” he says, and runs out of the room.

“Um,” Bucky says, arm still extended.

“It’s Tony,” Bruce says. “He’ll be back in five minutes or an hour.”

“This could help people,” Bucky says, wiggling a finger.

“Looks like it,” Steve says, at the same time that Bruce says, “It’s very likely, yes.”

Bucky subsides, places his arm back on his lap, but there’s a small smile on his face as he does.

“Well, I’m done for now,” Bruce says. “You seem fine. My scans say you’re enhanced in a similar way Steve is, so I’ll just print you out some information about his dietary and exercise requirements and you can start there. I’m not seeing much in the brain area, but that’s probably the healing factor at work, which is promising.” Bucky nods, and Bruce sort of nods back and wanders off with a gentle pat to Bucky’s shoulder.

“I could ask Tony about getting you a room of your own,” Steve says, his tone making it half a question. He doesn’t want to admit to the relief he feels when Bucky only shakes his head at the suggestion, and nods at the following one to go up to Steve’s floor.

“Tony’s a bit overboard,” Steve says in warning as the numbers on the lift display tick up and up. “He gave people whole floors, basically.”

“You need a whole floor, with all this,” Bucky jabs with a motion towards Steve’s pecs, very deftly managing to bring the conversation back around to the one topic Steve had wanted to avoid. How was he supposed to tell someone that he’d undergone experimental surgery for them and then let them down in the end anyway?

“Um,” he says, and tries to steer the conversation back to safer waters. “Well, even with this. It’s a lot of space.”

“We have time now,” Bucky says, and when he fixes Steve with the old glare he used to level at Steve every time he was being stubborn it feels so familiar that it’s dizzying.

“Um,” he says again, as the lift doors open.

“Eloquent,” Bucky snorts as the two of them leave.

“It was an experimental procedure,” Steve says slowly, like if he talks slow enough Bucky’ll just forget the sentence before it finishes. Of course he has no such luck, and Bucky’s glare only grows sharper. “I - was approached,” he says delicately. “Asked if I wanted to serve my country and all that jazz.” He tries to carefully keep names and motivations and dates out of the story, but it’s a useless venture.

Bucky, damn him, raises an eyebrow. “What the ever loving fuck got you to say yes?” he asks with folded arms. “When was this, anyway?” Steve has spent so long with people he’d come to know after the serum he’s forgotten how to hide from the one who knew him best before it all. Not that he could ever really hide anything from Bucky.

“Uh,” Steve says. “They were promising a pretty great job with SHIELD, and I’d never turn down a bit of extra cash for Becca’s loans. And, you know, help the country.”

“When was this?” Bucky asks helplessly, and when Steve pauses too long in giving an answer he puts a hand over his eyes. “Stevie, tell me when.”

“Late March, around then,” Steve says.

“Tell me why.”

“I did -”

“Bullshit, Stevie, don’t lie to me -”

“Can you just leave it -”

“It was me, wasn’t it,” Bucky says, shoulders slumping. “My salary was enough to get Becca through uni with her scholarship, but - fuck, I was captured in late March -”

“Not everything’s about you, Jesus,” Steve says, but it’s weak and they can both tell.

Bucky sits down heavily on the couch and looks around the floor for the first time. Steve follows his lead, tries to see what Bucky would see; plain walls and tasteful furniture and clean floors, sharp lines that shape the floor. A perfectly hospitable house for Steve to return to, after missions.

“Fuck, Steve, you can’t just do shit like that,” he says finally, and his face is pale and tight. “It was an _experimental surgery_. You could’ve _died_.”

“Maybe I was just sick of being sick,” Steve says obstinately, folds his arms. “And it went fine. I’m fine.”

“You’re fucking not, you -” Bucky takes a breath and falls silent. “It was Fury, wasn’t it? Steve, that’s - that’s the worst kind of emotional manipulation -”

“You think I don’t know that? I’m not dumb, Buck,” Steve argues back. It’d been a shitty move for Fury to hit Steve with the serum’s opportunities when he’d just been mired in grief, but it hadn’t stopped him saying yes, and he didn’t regret it. “I don’t regret it, Bucky,” he says. “I’ve done good things with SHIELD.”

The two of them fall silent and stop looking at each other. Steve wants to say something that’ll magically reassure Bucky, will entirely stop this spat in its tracks, but as always, the words don’t come.

He ends up showing Bucky around the tower, getting him acquainted with the floors and their various purposes and occupants. It takes an unexpectedly long time, partly because the Tower is a massive thing and partly because Tony waylays them and manages to get Bucky into his lab. In classic Tony fashion it takes about five times as long as he’d promised because the ratio of work to aimless chattering is astonishingly unproductive.

Bucky nimbly avoids any awkwardness in their situation by going to take a nap almost as soon as the two of them arrive back on Steve’s floor. He closes the bedroom door and there isn’t so much as a murmur of noise from the direction of the room for the next hour.

Steve finds himself at a loss for anything to do. Usually by the time he comes back here he just crashes and when he wakes up there’s another mission waiting for him, or mission paperwork, or a new nonsensical training course for a newly developed weapon. When he’s desperate he has been known to sit in on other people’s missions. He could go down to the gym, which is what he does in the rare event of free time, but he doesn’t want to leave Bucky.

He finds himself doodling on the countertop. Shiny stone, as it turns out, isn’t the most receptive of mediums for pencil, and that’s the excuse he tells himself when it takes him an embarrassingly long time to figure out that he’s drawing Bucky.

It’s why he’d stopped drawing, actually, because every line and curve and shadow he’d set down on paper had turned into something that reminded him of Bucky. Sometimes it was as indirect as seeing the round of an apple and going back to a memory of eating them with Bucky; sometimes it was more direct, and Steve would find himself staring down, wrists aching, at a page full of the careless graceful body parts he loved so well.

A glance at the clock shows that it’s been about an hour when Steve gives up and rubs a hand over the doodles, because he doesn’t want to erase it completely but he doesn’t want to spend any more time staring at it, either.

Steve’s just come to the conclusion that he really needs to get some sort of hobby when a muffled noise comes through the door that Bucky’s behind. He doesn’t really think before getting up and moving towards it, especially when they grow louder, and then just after he gives up on walking and starts to jog there’s a muffled, broken off scream which nearly causes him to trip over nothing at all.

“Buck?” he can’t help but ask as he pushes the door open. “Buck, are you -?”

In his worry he advances too quickly, and Bucky, wide-eyed and tense, tries to slap him away. Steve retreats and calls Bucky’s name a few more times, until the other man could sit up more steadily and look at Steve with awareness in his stare, even while residual fear lingers.

“Hey,” Steve says, soft, softer. He ventures forward again, but slowly, telegraphing every movement. “You okay?”

“I need - I can’t,” Bucky says, just as quiet, his voice scream-shredded, and the next thing Steve knows he’s alone in the room, Bucky having sidestepped him neatly on his way out.

That hurts, more than anything. It drives into the softest part of Steve and stays there until it’s hard to breathe.

“Captain Rogers,” JARVIS says from the ceiling, bringing Steve back from wherever he’s been, staring at the mussed and empty bed.

“Yeah, JARVIS?” he asks, scrubbing at his hair and feeling unreasonably exhausted for the relatively still-early hour; a look at the alarm clock beside the bed tells him it’s just past one-thirty.

“Sergeant Barnes wishes you to know he’s leaving -”

“What, _no_ , what?” Steve cries out, and nearly falls over again in his haste to get up.

“He also says he will return presently, Captain Rogers,” JARVIS says, sounding too disapproving for an artificial intelligence system even as Steve slumps back against the bedframe, too thankful to get a word out.

“Thanks, JARVIS,” he says in the general direction of the ceiling, and gets no reply, either because his statement does not warrant one or because JARVIS is trying to train Steve to stop looking at the ceiling every time he wants to talk to the AI.

“Guy’s working through issues,” Tony says when Steve skulks into his basement to sit and watch Tony work, quick fingers and clever hands flicking through machine parts and tools seemingly with a mind of their own. “Some things need to happen alone.” Steve hums morosely, reluctant agreement. Tony rolls his eyes and turns to face Steve. “That was a subtle hint, Cap,” he says, brandishing a glowing blue thing in Steve’s face. “Delicate nuclear physics happening here. I’ve reached my emotion quota for the day.”

“I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” Steve says, and pushes himself off the bench that he’d been sat on, careful not to disturbing any of the equipment near him that Tony is trying not to watch anxiously and mostly failing. “How’s the thumbdrive coming along?” he remembers to ask when he reaches the door; even though it’d been his excuse to come down to the lab he’d forgotten to ask when confronted with glowing blue, sparking red, and an impossibly loud drill.

“Okay,” Tony says, and then sighs and flips up his protective glasses. “I got JARVIS on it. It’s probably going to be a few more hours before he gets it. Hey, JARVIS, where are you on the thumbdrive?”

“Approximately five percent, sir,” JARVIS says. “The coding and encryption is complicated. Barring extenuating circumstances I will have it ready in three days at the latest.”

Tony makes finger guns at Steve. “There ya go,” he says, and flips the glasses on his head back down.

“Okay,” Steve says. “Thanks.” And then, at something of a loss, he goes up to the gym. It’s just after he sends the first punching bag flying over to the opposite wall that he realises it’s not SHIELD but Tony that’s he’s costing, and tries to hang it back up. It swings dismally, and he gives it a few apologetic pats and flees towards the treadmill; usually he’d go outside to run, especially since he’d missed his morning run, but he’s irrationally afraid that he’ll run into Bucky somewhere Bucky doesn’t want to be run into. He’s very aware that it’s probably not healthy on his part, but if Bucky needs space Steve is perfectly willing to give him the whole of New York.

“JARVIS,” he says, once he’s reached an embarrassingly high number of miles on the treadmill.

“Yes, Captain Rogers?”

“Can you tell me when Bucky gets back? Or did he ask you not to?” Steve asks.

“He did not ask me to do anything of the sort, no,” JARVIS says. “I will inform you when he returns.”

“Thanks,” Steve says, looking around the empty gym. He’s relatively sure that there’d been at least a few people when he came in but he’d been so preoccupied that he couldn’t be sure. “What’s the time?”

“Six forty-three pm, Captain Rogers,” JARVIS says.

“Thanks,” Steve says, and tries to recall what he has in his pantry throughout the trip back up to his apartment, where he discovers that all he has is an empty mustard jar, an egg, and somehow, an entire bulb of garlic. “Damn,” he says on a sigh, and turns around to head right back down to the communal kitchen, which is better stocked mostly by virtue of JARVIS putting in a weekly order of food with the nearest Aldi’s.

“Sergeant Barnes has returned, Captain,” JARVIS says, and Steve spills soy sauce over the kitchen bench.

“Fuck,” he mutters, grabbing a paper towel to mop up the mess. “Is he - where’s he going?”

In lieu of an answer, the elevator dings and Bucky walks out. Even the way he walks is different to before, in small but evident ways. He’s more contained, quieter, as though he doesn’t want to be noticed. This Bucky would probably spend a nine-hour plane trip sitting up and watching his surroundings, would never spread himself over a couch and accept blankets draped over him with nothing more than a murmur and slight smile.

“Oh,” Bucky says, somewhat guiltily, when he notices Steve standing still in the kitchen with a plate of rice and chicken. “Hi.” That hurts, too; the thought that Bucky had come here to avoid him. Steve has no idea what to do; is vaguely surprised to find that he’s been resourceful enough to continue holding the plate steady.

“Hey,” Steve says, a full few seconds after Bucky’s own greeting. “Are you okay?”

Bucky raises a hand and wiggles it a few times. “Yeah,” he says. “I don’t. I mean. I shouldn’t.”

“Why shouldn’t you be?” Steve asks, immediately concerned. The plate clanks loudly against the counter as he puts it down to take a step forward before he remembers that might not be welcome and stops. “Did Bruce miss something? Do you need anything -?”

“No,” Bucky says, and shakes his head as he steps back. “No, I’m fine.” He says _fine_ in a tone that implies the exact opposite. He backs right up into the still-open elevator and stabs what looks to be a random button. The doors close between them and Steve doesn’t know what to do so intensely it feels like an ache in his chest.

“Fuck,” he mutters, somewhat childishly, for no other reason than he hopes it’ll make him feel a little better as he picks up the plate again. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it does no such thing. The food, when he forces it down, is at least a step up from bad in that it’s tasteless and feels like cardboard in his mouth, but his enhanced metabolism has crashed enough times that he eats it by rote anyway.

“Captain Rogers,” JARVIS says, when he’s about halfway through the plate. “Would you prefer Sergeant Barnes to vacate your floor and ask Mr. Stark for other accommodations?”

“What!” Steve exclaims, straightening from his position over the plate. “No! Who gave him that idea? No! Unless he wants to,” he backtracks. “That’s, um, his choice. And I will respect that. But I don’t want him to leave, that’s the last thing I want.” And then, a second later, “Why are you even asking?”

“Sergeant Barnes asked me to convey the message to you and its response to him,” JARVIS says.

“Oh,” Steve says, and then, “Well. Tell him I don’t want him to go. But he can, if he wants to.”

“The message you gave has already been communicated,” JARVIS says. “Sergeant Barnes says he will take the same guest bedroom as this afternoon.”

It makes something twist in Steve’s stomach, to think of Bucky willingly returning to the place where’d he’d woken up screaming just hours ago, but he has to concede, if reluctantly, that it’d only be impractical and probably unhealthy to give him a different bed every time he has a nightmare.

“Why didn’t he ask me himself? He was just here,” Steve says, not really expecting an answer.

“If I may,” JARVIS says from wherever the speakers are, “sometimes people find it easier to engage in interaction through a proxy form.”

“Right,” Steve says. The elevator doors manage to strike a particularly forbidding figure when he looks at them, all silver and shining. He wants to go back to his floor, but he doesn’t know if Bucky wants to continue being alone. If Steve was willing to give Bucky the whole of New York, the 31st floor of Stark Tower is nothing. There are other rooms and empty floors he could spend the night. “Thanks, JARVIS.”

“Of course, Captain,” JARVIS says primly, and the elevator doors open just before Steve’s fingers can reach the button to call it. Sometimes Steve wishes that Tony’d programmed his AI with a little less snark.

His rooms look the same as they always do when the elevator doors open on his floor. Somehow, the place seems cavernous and empty despite the fact it is literally the exact same room, in the exact same layout, that he’d left just this afternoon.

He’s in the habit of keeping his things intensely neat, mostly because he’s never around and it’s always easy enough to put things back where they came from when he isn’t interacting with them that much. Somehow, now, the neatness seems Spartan, unnecessarily military. The apartment he’d kept with Bucky had always been some level of messy, the inevitable result of two guys in their mid-twenties and a teen girl living in the same cramped quarters. He misses that, abruptly; the homeliness of it, the air of a place well-lived. These rooms, for all their opulence and sleek lines, don’t have any of that. It’s not their fault; they’re perfectly good rooms, but Steve has never been able to meet them in the middle and make them a home.

The door leading into Bucky’s bedroom is firmly closed. It seems to glare out at him, protective of the man inside, and Steve retreats after a glance. 

When he heads to bed, Steve is terribly tempted, for a moment, to knock on Bucky’s door and wish him goodnight, but that would probably be both unwelcome and uncomfortable, so after a brief pause he continues on past Bucky’s door and towards his own.

“Goodnight, Buck,” he says to the wall between them, and has to pause to wonder what the fuck he’s doing, talking at a wall instead of opening a door to say those words directly. JARVIS was right, he has to conclude; it is easier to speak without being face-to-face. Perhaps inevitably, after that particular thought had struck him, he falls asleep trying and failing to not think about conducting conversations with Bucky around corners for the rest of their lives. He’d take that, and gladly, if it was all Bucky could offer, but he’s selfish enough to want more.

~*~

LOCATION: FLOOR 31, STARK TOWER  
NIGHTTIME, MANHATTAN, NEW YORK

The first night that Bucky had woken the two of them up with his nightmares, he’d left the room before Steve could enter; Steve had stumbled out of his bedroom just in time to see the elevator doors close. The second night he’d been faster, or Bucky had been slower. They’d come out into the corridor at the same time, and Steve had had enough time to reach out before Bucky had shaken his head and retreated back into his bedroom. The door had slammed shut behind him, and Steve had wanted to crumble.

On both occasions, he’d been nowhere to be found in the morning and unresponsive when he returned to the Tower at night. The first night he’d simply retreated into his room again, but on the second he’d stayed with Steve, sitting in silence for an hour before retiring. Steve hoped that meant something.

“Captain Rogers,” JARVIS says from the ceiling at around nine on the third night. “I have successfully decrypted the thumbdrive.”

“What is it?” Steve asks.

“It appears to be case files pertaining to Sergeant Barnes’s imprisonment,” JARVIS says. Somehow he manages to make the artificial smoothness of his voice apologetic.

“Not - not without his permission, thanks, JARVIS,” Steve manages to get out. Bucky has a metal arm now, and as much as Steve accepts all of Bucky a metal arm is not a promising sign of any kind of positive treatment.

“Sir said you’d say that,” JARVIS agrees. “The drive will remain unopened.”

“Thanks, JARVIS,” Steve murmurs. “Thank Tony as well.”

Bucky steps out of the elevator then, and hesitates before sitting down silently. There was a time where Steve would’ve attempted to talk to him, but now he sits in studied peaceful silence and waits for Bucky to make the first move, pretending that words aren’t trying to bubble past his teeth.

He’s determined that the third night is going to be different. When Bucky excuses himself tonight he murmurs, “Goodnight,” and Steve is not quite surprised enough to let him leave without a responding, “Night, Buck.”

That night Bucky’s noises are quieter, but Steve flings himself out of bed at the first sign of them, wide awake in an instant. He nearly falls over the bedside table, but tonight he’s fast enough to get into the other room before Bucky has gotten out of bed.

“Buck,” he says when he steps near the bed, and the next thing he knows he’s been flipped onto the floor from a distance he’d assumed was safe. Bucky’s metal hand digs into his neck for an instant and before it can properly register he recoils so fast that he hits the bedframe, eyes wide awake and horrified. Steve can’t help but notice the way the moonlight plays over his shoulders and collarbone.

“Steve,” he breathes, voice fragile and ready to break as he pushes himself up with shaking hands. “I should go,” he says. “I can’t -”

“No!” Steve exclaims, also pushing himself up. “I mean. Please don’t.”

“I _hurt_ you,” Bucky says, and the self-loathing visible in his eyes through the darkness of the room makes Steve want to cry. “I can’t hurt you. I remember you.”

“It’s not your fault,” Steve says. “What you’ve been through -”

“You don’t know what I’ve been through -”

“You spent three years with HYDRA, I can make an educated guess,” Steve says sharply, and steps forward very gently and very slowly, the same way he would step towards a frightened animal, maybe.

The movement of his body is totally at odds with the sound of his voice, which cannot help but show how afraid he is; he’s positive that there are many wrong ways to handle this situation, but he doesn’t know what the right way is. He’s terrified there’s no right way and whatever he does will send Bucky running permanently, this time. “Please don’t go,” he says, terror cracking him open, bleeding him out.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Bucky breathes. The words land softly in the room.

“Let me help you with that,” Steve says, managing to keep his voice equally soft. For a moment there’s silence, and then Steve can’t help but continue. “You deserve to be fine. You deserve to be _happy_ , Buck -”

“You can’t make that call,” Bucky says, shaking his head.

“I -”

“You don’t _know_ ,” Bucky says, almost desperate, almost frantic. “The things I’ve done -”

“Did you even _want_ to -”

“It doesn’t make a fucking difference,” Bucky snarls, hostile and defensive and violently pushing the idea away because he wants it to be true so badly. “I did those things, I killed those people - innocent people, not people who deserved it, _children_ -”

Steve, aware that this is probably a wrong thing to do but flailing, out of his depth, just reaches out, lets his fingers touch that vulnerable spot where flesh and metal merge, Bucky’s past and present. Those words stumble to a stop, and the trembling of his body stills a little.

It’s impossible to send messages through a touch but Steve tries anyway, tries to let the press of his fingers against Bucky’s shoulder say everything he doesn’t know how to. _I’m here for you, I’ll always be here, this won’t scare me away, you can fall apart on me and I’ll always to my best to catch you_. He can’t know if any of them register. In one moment it feels like he’s pushing sentiment through skin, and in the next it feels like those thoughts are leaping and crashing unceremoniously on the small space of floor between them.

“You shouldn’t,” Bucky starts, and then sighs to a stop, probably because he still knows that trying to out-stubborn Steve Rogers is a hopeless venture. “I’m not who I was, Stevie.” Steve’s not sure whether the nickname is deliberate or whether it’d simply slipped out, but it still makes his heart leap unfairly.

“Neither am I, in case you didn’t notice,” Steve says. This gets him the slightest ease in posture, and, pushing his luck, steps closer. Bucky doesn’t move away, and Steve swears he can feel his heart speeding up the closer it gets to Bucky.

“I could hurt you,” Bucky says, but his voice is weak and his hands have come up to rest on Steve’s waist, warm and welcome.

Steve shakes his head. “Look at my neck,” he says, and gently tips his head to one side despite the protesting noise from the other man. “No, look. There’s nothing. You let me go.”

He’s immeasurably pleased when Bucky’s hand comes up to trace his skin, has to suppress a shiver at the gentle touch.

“Maybe you got lucky,” Bucky murmurs, and Steve has to suppress the urge to say something terribly cheesy like _I did, with you_.

“I heal real fast now,” Steve says, soft. “And even if there were bruises, I wouldn’t leave. You shouldn’t have to go through this alone.”

Even with his head tilted awkwardly the way it is, Steve can see Bucky’s face melt into something impossible and soft. His hand drops back down, and then he’s leaning his weight into Steve. “I don’t deserve you,” Steve hears him say raggedly, and from there, somehow, they end up curled together on the bed, arms around each other and soft sheets surrounding them.

“You do,” Steve says, once the two of them are settled and still. “You deserve all the good things.”

Bucky shakes his head again and says something quiet in Russian; Steve would ask for a translation, but Bucky’s breathing is evening out as Steve strokes his hair. He is happy to suffer not knowing a few words for this.

The morning light is spilling playfully through the curtains when Steve wakes up. Like the last time he’d woken up with Bucky warm against him, the awakening is slower, softer than Steve’s usual instantaneous snap from unconsciousness to wakefulness.

The sunlight moves up the bed, and Steve is somehow allowed to look down at a sleeping Bucky. Even in sleep he’s not quite peaceful, muscles tense and forehead carved with frown lines. Very gently, Steve reaches up a hand to rub at them, trying to smooth them out as though by removing the physical proof he’ll be able to remove the feeling itself. He doesn’t think it quite works, but Bucky sighs and leans into the hand, those lines softening a little, so Steve counts it as a win.

He lets himself drift back downwards, content to simply lie where he is and hold Bucky, but it’s then that the other man stirs, slowly but surely moving away from Steve. He doesn’t want to tighten his grip in case it makes Bucky feel trapped, but he can’t bear the thought of Bucky stealing out of the room either, so he opens his eyes and raises an eyebrow instead. It’s as effective as Steve could have hoped; Bucky sees the movement, freezes, and looks up at him, a little guilty.

“Don’t go,” Steve murmurs, letting his eyes stay half-lidded the way Bucky’s always liked. It was a nearly guaranteed way to win a kiss off him, back when they lived together, and Steve is not past using it now. Bucky’s eyes meet his and drop, fast, his body going even tenser under Steve’s hands.

“I’m not him, Steve,” he say, tired, like he already knows that Steve’s not going to let him win this argument. “You deserve more than a shadow.”

“Don’t I deserve to love who I want?” Steve asks. It is quite possibly the ultimate say in playing dirty, because it is exactly what Bucky would say to him, every time Steve was feeling guilty over being too weak to work or using too much money for his medicines or not being able to keep his mouth shut and worrying Bucky and Becca by coming home bruised and bloodied over and over again.

“That’s not fair,” Bucky says weakly. “I remember saying that to you.”

“My turn, now,” Steve says, and, feeling very daring, leans forward to kiss Bucky on the forehead. “And like I said yesterday, I’m not the fella you left behind, either. And I still want you.” The sunbeams dance upwards and play across Bucky’s wrists, painting them in cheerful gold.

Bucky sighs, and something in his eyes seems to grow softer and somehow more resolved, all at once. “JARVIS decrypted those files Nat gave you, didn’t he?”

“How - of course Tony went and asked you,” Steve mutters.

“I want you to read the files,” he says, without meeting Steve’s eyes. “And whatever your friend has on me. You should - know that. About me.”

Slowly, very aware of the many reasons Bucky may have for wanting his own space, Steve tugs him closer, and Bucky lets himself be pulled, tucks his face in Steve’s neck. Steve can feel the fast breaths he’s taking, the way he’s clenching the sheets, can see the too-fast flutter of Bucky’s pulse in his neck.

“It won’t change anything,” Steve says, but he doesn’t think Bucky hears him. He settles for moving his hands gently over Bucky’s body, instead, gentle strokes over the topography of the other man’s back and waist and sides, careful to keep the movements painstakingly gentle, as non-threatening as he can make it.

“Go on, then,” Bucky says, voice and body steady as he pulls slightly away from Steve, an indeterminate amount of time later. Bucky has always been the best at making Steve lose track of time.

“You should come, too,” Steve says, and slides his hand down to tangle his fingers with Bucky’s. Bucky just shakes his head wordlessly, and Steve nods.

“Okay,” he murmurs. He pulls himself out of the bed at the same time as Bucky, and walks as close to the other man as he thinks he can get away with as they move towards the elevator.

Bucky’s fingers twitch in his, a little, when the elevator doors open, and Steve can see the fluttering of that delicate vein in his neck that signals a too-fast pulse.

“It won’t change anything,” he says as he moves into the elevator, pushing the B button that’s in between 4 and 5, because Tony can’t even do a numbering system without putting his own spin on it, apparently. He looks up and meets Bucky’s eyes, and even though the gap between them is miniscule, it might as well be infinite, from the way Bucky’s looking at him. “Buck -” Steve says helplessly, wanting to do something, anything, to get that look off his best guy’s face, and then Bucky’s leaning forward and it seems like Steve’s brain shorts out for a moment -

Because then they’re kissing, they’re kissing, Steve’s kissing Bucky and it’s wonderful – Bucky still kisses like a dawn, and it seems like the world flushes pink and golden and warmer around Steve even as his heart tries to beat right out of his chest.

They’re both breathing harder when Bucky pulls away, lips kiss-bitten and slick and perfect. Steve wants to kiss them again; nearly does, before Bucky ducks past him and pushes the button that’ll close the elevator door.

Steve would probably have gone down to the basement with nothing but that kiss on his mind, floating and dazed and delighted, but Bucky makes the mistake of turning away from the closing doors too fast, letting his expression fall just a little too soon.

“JARVIS, sorry, open the doors again, please,” Steve says just when they’ve started to move down. Steve can feel JARVIS’s exasperation when the elevator jerks to a stop, and has definite proof of it when the doors open then and there, leaving Steve to step up and out of the elevator since JARVIS apparently can’t be bothered to take it back up to the actual floor level.

Bucky turns around, surprised, in time to see Steve step out of the elevator, and whatever look Steve’s wearing on his face probably isn’t very friendly because Bucky’s shoulders fall a little at the sight of him. “I’m sorry,” Bucky says, backing up a step. “That was a shitty thing to do without permission. I won’t -”

“You _asshole_ ,” Steve says, which isn’t the most tactful thing but the way Bucky’s face had fallen is seared in his mind and it makes him fucking angry, to think of Bucky feeling that kind of sadness. “You thought that was the last time you were gonna kiss me?”

“I -” Bucky starts, but falls silent when Steve takes the two steps that puts their bodies a breath away from each other. Colour rises in his cheeks, breath coming a little faster. “I wanted to do it,” he says. “At least once.”

“You jerk,” Steve says on a sigh. It feels like the anger melts right out of him, replaced by something deeper and warmer that settles in his bones. He raises a hand to touch Bucky’s cheek, gentle; Bucky leans into the contact like he can’t help it. “Weren’t you listening when I told you it wouldn’t make a difference?”

“Go and read the files,” Bucky says, and then adds, “you punk,” a little resentfully, because he never passed up a chance to call Steve a punk. It feels like a sign and countersign; jerk; punk.

“I love you,” Steve says, feeling reckless and stupid and brave, feeling like he’s holding out his heart. It’s been three fucking days and already he’s at this. But then, it’s been a lot more than a day since he’d first said those words to Bucky. “That hasn’t changed. It’s not going to.” Bucky’s eyes open, suspiciously shiny.

“Tell me again,” he says, and Steve obliges more than happily. This is something they used to do as well.

“I love you,” he says, and kisses Bucky’s forehead again just because it’s there and  
Steve wants to kiss it. “That’s not going to change.”

“I love you too,” Bucky says, like it’s being dragged out of him, and Steve’s world stops turning for a moment.

“Again,” he demands, and Bucky’s lips turn up.

“I love you,” he says, and this time it’s so soft that Steve almost can’t hear it but an undeniable sweetness that more than makes up for it.

It’s Steve who leans forward, this time, and they’re forced to keep their kisses brief because he can’t stop smiling; their lips meet once, twice, three times, and Steve reluctantly backs away.

“That’s not the last time I’m kissing you,” he says, and Bucky smiles down at him as he steps down into the elevator. He looks soft, in the morning light, the lines of his body more settled, the grey in his eyes so tender it makes Steve’s heart ache.

“You make it sound like a warning,” he says.

“A promise,” Steve says. “If you want to take me up on it.”

“I’ll want to,” Bucky says, and this time when the elevator doors close between them he keeps on watching Steve as long as he can, and that gorgeous soft expression that makes Steve feel like a lovestruck teenager again stays on his face with no sign of changing.

Apparently the expression on Steve’s own face is not much better at all, because the moment Tony lays eyes on him he’s saying, “Oh my god, oh my god, no, get out, go away, this lab wasn’t meant to handle that level of soppiness, you’re going to make everything explode -”

“Shut up, Tony,” Steve says, perfectly aware that he doesn’t sound angry at all and also perfectly okay with that fact.

“Is that the face you make when you’ve been fucked? Or when you fuck? Is there a difference? Can I take pictures for science?” Tony asks. The look on his face is best described as a mixture of fascinated and disgusted.

“I didn’t fuck Bucky,” Steve says. “And he didn’t fuck me. We just kissed.” He feels a little dopey just thinking about it, and altogether too gleeful at Tony’s look of dawning horror.

“That’s what you look like when you _kiss_?” he asks, voice getting higher. “Dear lord, I  
need to find you somewhere else to be when you shack up. JARVIS, make a list of all the empty properties I own and get it to me, stat.”

“Yes, sir,” the AI says.

“Shut up,” Steve says. “Bucky sent me down to look at those Winter Soldier files.”

“Can I ask why he’s not down here himself?” Tony asks.

“He didn’t want to read the files,” Steve says.

“That’s…not a good sign,” Tony settles on.

“He thinks - he thought we were going to blame him for what they made him do,” Steve says, and can’t quite help the way his shoulders square and his chin juts out when he says, “Which I’m _not_.”

“And you convinced him of that through kisses,” Tony infers. Steve can’t help the blush that steals over his face then, either. “Magical. Do I stay or go?”

“JARVIS?” Steve asks after a moment of hesitation. “Can you ask Bucky if he wants Tony to read that file on him or just me?”

“Certainly, Captain,” JARVIS says, and a second later says, “Yes.”

“Yes what?” Tony asks.

“Yes you can read it,” JARVIS elaborates.

“Tell Bucky thanks from me?” Steve asks, JARVIS does so, obligingly.

“All right then,” Tony says, and opens the file.

Steve had known, objectively, that HYDRA was a shithole of awful ideas and terrible people, the kind of people who’d willingly strap chemical bombs into a plane and send them to capital cities around the world. The kind of people who would take down a hundred innocent people to get to one target, or gas a village of two thousand for something as petty as monetary gain.

Somehow, knowing that doesn’t make reading about the atrocities they visited on a good man, a man Steve loves, any easier. It’s fucking horrifying, enough that Steve has to clench his jaw to keep reading and Tony takes several breaks, getting up to wander around the lab and pet his robots with slightly uncharacteristic care.

“You don’t have to read it,” Steve says; Tony had told him about Afghanistan, and a lot of this probably can’t help but be reminiscent, for him.

“I’m fine,” Tony says predictably.

“You’re not fine,” Steve argues. “The last thing Bucky would want is to hurt someone. So. You don’t have to read it, if you don’t want to.”

Tony goes to speak, and then hesitates. “I’ll join you sometimes,” he says. “And maybe you could - summarise for me? What he’d want me to know?”

“Okay,” Steve says, careful not to make the fuss that Tony is afraid of, and goes back to the pages on the screen in front of him.

It’s sickening, what they’ve done; there are pages and pages of gratuitous handwritten descriptions of medical abuse and experimentation at the hands of an Emil Zola. Somehow it finds a way to get worse, and there are also entire sections dedicated to using a sample of Steve’s blood obtained from battlegrounds to try and recreate the serum, which - it’s not his fault, he knows that, but without him Bucky’d never have suffered as he did. Bucky’s reported as being the only one to survive the experiments, and the scientists just - pushed and pushed and pushed. Sometimes he’s brought out for a mission, but the general consensus tends towards the view that he’s not reliable enough. Every damn time Steve thinks it’s going to end there’s another section, more cramped handwriting and photographs and fucking diagrams appear on the page, illustrating how to break and mould a man in just a handful of years.

The name HYDRA crops up several times. Steve wants to kill them.

Bucky had fought. He’d said _Steve_ and then refused to elaborate, when HYDRA had asked him to, regardless of what they’d done. Steve has to stop and just sit, after reading that report.

“I hate them,” Steve says, when he finally reaches the end of the document. It hurts to speak, both metaphorically and literally, since his jaw has been clenching for an unknown amount of time. It feels like he’s been hunched towards the screen forever, but a look at the clock shows that it’s only been about half an hour. He cannot imagine what it felt like to be suffering the experiences written on the paper.

“I know,” Tony says. “I know.” He’s petting Dum-E on the floor, and the little robot whirs happily at the attention.

“JARVIS? Can you ask Bucky to come down here?” Steve asks. He has no idea what he can say but he just wants to be close to the other man for a while. “And take the files off the screen, fuck, please,” he adds.

“Certainly, Captain,” JARVIS says, and barely a minute later the elevator doors open and Bucky steps out. He’s slightly hunched in on himself and his eyes are caught on Steve like he can’t look anywhere else.

“Please come here?” Steve asks, and when Bucky does Steve just - wraps his arms around him. “I hate them,” he says into Bucky’s stomach, because he’d forgotten that he was sitting down and Bucky was standing up, and the height difference that would ensue when Bucky approached. “I love you so much.”

“I love you too,” Bucky says on an exhale. “You read it, though? What I did?”

“What they made you do,” Steve says, and tries his best to make his voice as implacable as possible. “I will literally argue this with you until we both drop dead.”

“Steve,” Bucky says.

“Bucky,” Steve says, still implacable.

“They were using pretty sophisticated torture and coercion,” Tony says from his position on the floor where he’s still petting Dum-E and now also U, who has come to join the party. “And some things I’ve never seen before, with your brain. There is a solid argument that you weren’t responsible for any of those things -”

“Of course I am, my hands -”

“Not your mind, though,” Steve says. “You weren’t in control.” When Bucky simply looks at him, he continues. “They took away your memories. How can you blame yourself for what you did then?” His voice is soft and hurt and caught between his mouth and Bucky’s stomach like a secret. Bucky leans down, wordless, and wraps himself around Steve until they are tucked into each other and also on the floor, somehow.

“Well, that was terrible and something I never want to read again,” Tony says.

“Sorry,” Bucky says. “I just thought - you should know. What I’ve done. Or what they made me do, okay, don’t look at me like that, Stevie.”

“It doesn’t change a thing,” Steve insists somewhat petulantly, and presses a kiss to the nearest part of Bucky, which happens to be his shoulder. “I told you it wouldn’t. And the promise still stands.”

“I said I was going to take you up on it,” Bucky promises in turn, and ducks down to kiss Steve, short and sweet.

“This is ridiculous,” Tony says. “Let’s move on.”

“Hmm,” Steve says, and nuzzles closer into Bucky’s shoulder.

~*~

INTERLUDE  
LOCATION: LONG ISLAND BEE FARM  
LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK

Natasha has been to the bee farm five times in nine months of work. She once considered it a peaceful place, if not a quiet one, but the person she has met and the commands she has received here have worn that first impression down. Natasha does not tend to burn her bridges, but she does not want to come back here once she has been released.

Pierce sits where he always does, a discreet little bench at the very back of the farm where the fence divides it from the street on the other side. Through some mishap or carelessness, the bench faces towards the tall fence, and is thus very convenient for a man who wants to hide his face. He does not turn his head when she enters his field of vision and does not acknowledge her when she sits down. She is tired - it is a long flight from Marrakesh to New York - but she has made sure that nobody can see it.

“It’s a ledger,” she says, soft. Her head is turned slightly towards him so that she can reassure herself that they cannot be heard, and her gaze lands on the nearest beekeeper, carefully taking hard-earned honey from the worker bees. “HYDRA’s infrastructure. Who they are, who they control, where the money comes from.” It’s bad protocol, but she turns to look at him directly, her gaze scrutinising his implacable profile. “It’s everything you want to know.”

“And what,” Pierce asks the fence in front of him, voice iron-unforgiving, “makes you think that the so-called ledger is authentic?”

“Why would Schmidt want it so badly if it wasn’t authentic?”

“Why would he ever let you have it if it was? Did you not stop to consider that he may want me to have it?” He turns to look at her properly for the first time. “Misinformation, manipulation - it’s what he does, Natasha, it’s what he’s trained to do. Schmidt lies to you, you sell the lies to me. Together, we are both compromised. That’s his ultimate objective.”

 _He still trusts me_ , Natasha wants to say. It is on the tip of her tongue, but it is not something she can truly mean. 

“This may be authentic,” Pierce continues. “But I only trust one person to verify that information.” Natasha closes her eyes, just for a second; there is a crawling down her spine. “You,” he says, and the single word drops into the air like a stone.

“No,” she says. She’s surprised it comes out steady, that it comes out at all when her heart feels like it is in her throat at the thought of going back. “My orders were to deliver you information. I’ve done that -”

“Your _orders_ were to infiltrate HYDRA, that we can learn more about them,” Pierce says, and his voice is more frustrated, more human, than Natasha has ever heard. “This isn’t proof, this is a test, like everything else. And the only way to pass? Go back.”

“I can’t do that,” Natasha says. “I’ve betrayed Schmidt’s trust too many times.”

“And in every instance, you did so of your own volition,” Pierce says, like that’s going to make a fucking difference when Schmidt inevitably loses his patience with her and her games.

“I needed to dispatch the escort to get the information here,” Natasha defends herself. “I -”

“And letting the Winter Soldier escape?”

“I didn’t _let him_ ,” Natasha spits out. “He broke through his programming. That is something you need to take up with Zola, not me.”

“And Steve Rogers? Where does releasing him come in, hm?”

“Rumlow was going to torture and kill him,” Natasha says evenly. It is a weak response, but she cannot say _it was a promise I made to James_ , so she delivers the lie with a strong voice and poker face. “That’s not what you wanted. The information he gave us would have been compromised.”

“I appreciate the initiative,” Pierce says, dry as a bone. “But your position is more important than his information. You should have let them do as they wished, and you would still have Schmidt’s trust.”

“I wasn’t going to let him die,” Natasha says, forcing her voice down to barely more than a whisper. “He’s our ally.”

“There are no allies in espionage, Natasha,” Pierce says, as though he is talking to a small child, “only common interests. As it stands, Steve Rogers is being hunted by the CIA. He is a man without a country. That will make it considerably easier to kill him.”

There is a brief pause, and the humming of the bees has never sounded so loud in Natasha’s ears in all her visits here. “Are you ordering me to -”

“No, no,” Pierce says, with a smile that is astonishing in its joviality. “Nothing so crude as that, in any case. Schmidt will order you to kill Rogers,” he says. “And to regain his trust, you will do it.” His voice is hard and unforgiving. Shivers crawl down Natasha’s spine again, and she hides it by leaning back.

“You sent me to do a job,” she says, a last-ditch protest, desperate. She has never begged anyone for anything before. She is dangerously close to it now. “I did it. Now, you bring me in. That was the deal.” Her body is leaned slightly towards him, and she pulls back.

“Might I remind you,” Pierce says, apparently not noticing her restless movements, “that as of now, you are without a country of your own. One of the co-founders of SHIELD called me yesterday asking about you personally. Of course, to protect your cover, I had to lie.”

Natasha closes her eyes, wants to call the person herself and explain, wants to be brought in. She wants to feel safe for once. Pierce had promised her that, after this. She should have known that people like her do not get that kind of privilege. “As far as anyone who is anyone is concerned, you are nothing more than a rogue Russian assassin, now working with an underground terrorist network, a target of opportunity. Natasha,” he says, and she opens her eyes again, meets his without flinching even though she wants to. “Precious few people know about your true identity. It would be unfortunate if any of them were to...forget.”

“I don’t -” she says, and cuts herself off because she thinks her voice might weaken and she knows he will not listen to her.

He picks up the thumbdrive and offers it to her. She looks at it for a few long seconds without meeting his eyes, trying desperately to think of another solution, any other way this situation can pan out.

“You see, there’s really no choice, Natasha,” he says, very gently, like he knows what she’s thinking. The words feel like blows against her skin anyway. “You’re going back.” Behind them, the beekeeper replaces the empty hive for the bees to fill up yet again, and makes off with his jars and bottles of honey.

“Give me that,” she murmurs eventually, as Pierce starts to withdraw his hand. Her movements  
are abrupt and less graceful than they should be when she stands up and walks away, USB in hand.

“Glad to know you’re still with us!” Pierce calls out from his bench, and somehow he manages to sound genial and jovial, an stately elderly man. Natasha does not look back.

She has to pass by the newly-emptied beehive on her way out of the farm. The small insects swarm over the empty spaces, and even as she watches several of them fly away to start anew from nothing.

The walk to her safehouse is, as always, long and winding. It takes about twice as long as it really needs to, and Natasha’s mind ticks every step of the way. Whatever Pierce may think, she is not a fool, refuses to be one. She is not going to be someone who will follow orders blindly just because they come from a source far above her in status and authority. She can think of no motive that Pierce may have to send her back to HYDRA when she has offered him everything he wanted. She only hesitates slightly before taking a cab to the tower and leaving a small package in the lobby.

She’d tested the drive before her meeting, and it’d been encrypted: all she had was a black screen with a blue stripe through it. She picks up one of her burner phones at the same time that she locks the door of her shitty apartment behind her.

“What?” the man on the other side asks groggily after the second ring, once she has her shoes off and feet up. It’s only early evening yet, the sky outside says, but that is none of her business.

“Stark,” Natasha says. She briefly considers apologising for waking him, but he’d be able to tell that she didn’t mean it, and he speaks before she can make an attempt anyway.

“What - who - Natasha?” If the frank bewilderment in his voice makes her smirk at the cracks in the wall in front of her, well, those cracks are the only ones to bear witness, and they can’t talk.

“Yes,” she says. “Is your line secure?”

“Um, one second - was it me you wanted to speak to? I can get Cap, or Buckaroo -”

“No, as long as you’re still working together anyone’s fine,” she says, and smiles to herself at the thought of James being called Buckaroo. “Secure?”

“Yes, okay, it doesn’t take me that long to secure a fucking line,” Stark says. “Why’re you calling?”

“You know how I said you could consider owing me?”

“Yeah,” Stark says, voice wary.

“Well, I’d like to cash it in.”

“That was quick,” Stark says.

“I work fast,” Natasha returns smoothly. “Besides, even if you choose not to count it as a favour, I think we all want to take down HYDRA. I hardly think you will turn me down.”

“No,” Stark agrees. “Tell me.”

“Long story short,” Natasha says, “my employer sent me in to obtain information about HYDRA. After some months there, I was sent to retrieve a ledger containing the exact information my employer wanted.”

“Alright,” Stark says.

“I retrieved it, and made a copy of it, and tried to open it. It’s encrypted,” Natasha says. “I’ve left a copy at your Tower.”

“You want me to decode it,” Stark says. His reluctance sounds practiced, and Natasha can hear the tell-tale sounds of movement even before he trips over something with a clatter and swears.

“That would be good, yes,” Natasha agrees.

“Hold one minute,” Stark says, not even bothering to pretend that he’s not interested anymore, and leaves a muffled sort of silence behind as he wanders off to, presumably, get the thumbdrive from the lobby.

He’s back around three minutes later, but doesn’t actually pick the phone back up; instead Natasha can hear the tapping of keys and muttered expletives of a frustrated man.

“I’m flattered you think I can get through it,” Stark says, and Natasha’s heart sinks even before he says, “But I can’t.”

“You can’t,” she repeats.

“No.”

“Can you tell me if it’s a ledger, at least?” she asks, and can almost hear Stark’s frown form through the line.

“Why wouldn’t it be a ledger?” he asks. “That’s what you said it was.” A few quiet taps make their way through the line.

“That’s what I was told by multiple sources I assumed were trustworthy on the subject,” Natasha says. She realises she’s fiddling with a toenail and forces herself to stop. “One of them was my employer. He didn’t seem interested in taking the thumbdrive when I tried to give it to him.”

The taps pause abruptly. “Why wouldn’t he - I thought he wanted to know how HYDRA works? The people in the ledger?”

“So did I,” Natasha says. The wall in front of her starts to squeak, and she glares. She fucking knew that rats lived here. She’s going to move out, she swears she is. She swears this every time she actually gets back and has to start living in the place, and then inevitably decides it’s not worth dealing with finding a new place and new landlord when she’s always leaving anyway. “I can’t think of a reason he wouldn’t want it.”

“So you don’t think it’s a ledger,” Stark says. “And you think your employer knows that.”

Natasha has to wonder, briefly, whether she’s given away too much. “Yes,” she says anyway.

“Do you think - your employer,” Stark begins. He sounds far more careful than she has come to expect from him. “D’you think he -”

“I don’t think so,” Natasha says, but the reply is almost automatic. She thinks of Pierce, sitting on the bench, easy and relaxed, like he’d absolutely owned the place, thinks of the way he always watches everyone passing by him with that casually assessing look in his eyes. Thinks of him manipulating events, pulling strings, and thinks, maybe. “Maybe,” she amends.

“Maybe,” Stark repeats, voice idle. The taps she can hear resolve themselves into a bang and he sighs. “I can’t get through,” he repeats. “We need specific biometrics for it.”

“Whose?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Someone important, then,” Natasha guesses, and hears the sigh on the other end of the line.

“Yes,” Stark admits.

“So you can’t tell me whether it’s a ledger or not?”

“I don’t - I don’t know,” Stark says. He sounds frustrated, and Natasha hears that bang again, like something is being slammed.

“Can you find out?”

“We’re trying to now,” Stark says reluctantly, after a pause which tells her that he does not trust her.

“How soon?”

“Soon, we hope,” Stark says.

“How soon?” Natasha presses, and Stark sighs.

“A matter of hours. A day, worst case scenario. Why?”

“Tell me what it is once you find out,” Natasha says. She only hesitates for a moment before she forges on. “If it’s not a ledger I’ll wipe the drive before I meet with Schmidt.”

There’s a pause on the other end, Stark so quiet that his microphone picks up the humming machinery of a plane in the background. Several clouds have made their way across Natasha’s grimy window by the time Tony replies. “You’d do that?” His voice is incredulous.

“I’d blame it on you,” Natasha says dryly. “As far as anyone knows you accompanied me to Marrakesh when I went to retrieve the drive.”

“What?” Stark asks. “Nevermind, I get it, you win either way, yeah you can go ahead and blame us -”

“I want the biometrics to open it myself,” Natasha says.

“I’m not in charge of that,” Stark says, his voice careful again, “but I don’t think that’s going to happen.” It’s what she expected, but it does complicate things.

“Then I want James to be the one to tell me yes or no,” Natasha says, and Stark does not argue. “And I need it done in fourteen hours. I meet with Schmidt tomorrow afternoon.”

“Schmidt’s HYDRA’s leader,” Stark surmises. He could have assumed as much from the notes Natasha had given him, and she stays silent now to confirm that. “Who’s your employer?” Stark asks.

“I’ll tell you if it’s not a ledger,” Natasha says. “Goodnight.” Stark draws in a breath on the other side of the line, but before he can speak again she ends the call and tosses the phone on her mattress more emphatically than she should, like throwing it away will send her problems sailing away too. She hopes she’s not doing the wrong thing. She has done enough of those in her lifetime.


	4. Chapter 4

LOCATION: BREWTIFUL BLENDS COFFEE STORE  
AFTERNOON, QUEENS, NEW YORK

“Aw, coffee, no,” is the first thing Bucky hears Clint say. Steve can’t help but laugh out loud, because it’s so _Clint_ that it’s perfect, even as Clint looks up pathetically from his spilled cup of coffee and signs some nasty things at Steve for laughing.

“This is Clint,” he says to Bucky anyway. “That just then pretty much sums up who he is as a person.”

“Fuck you, asshole,” Clint says. “Buy me another coffee. Hello,” he remembers to add, with a glance in Bucky’s direction. Steve doesn’t know if it’s Clint’s relaxed demeanour or his preoccupation with coffee that makes Bucky relax, but he’s grateful for it.

“Hi,” Bucky says carefully, and slides into the booth opposite Clint. It’d taken him a week to ask about going outside, and another two days to actually follow up on the question, but Steve would barely be able to tell if he didn’t know exactly how Bucky acts when he’s at ease.

“Why am I buying you a coffee?” Steve asks, even as he gets money out and prepares to head to the counter.

“You said mean things about me,” Clint says. “You want anything?” This last question is aimed at Bucky who startles back to reality from where he’s been examining the poster for Blue Hawaii on the wall.

“Huh?”

“Coffee,” Clint says, and Bucky looks dubiously at the menu. “The caramel latte’s good,” he adds, nonchalant, and Bucky nods and looks at Steve, who can only try to keep the smile on his face from growing to ridiculous proportions.

“One random coffee and one caramel latte, coming right up,” he says, and darts away before Clint can swear at him and give him a ridiculously complicated coffee order.

“Fuck you, Rogers,” Clint says when Steve returns with a stupidly fancy concoction with a name he can’t even pronounce, courtesy of letting the barita go wild.

“Fuck you too, Barton,” Steve says, and Bucky’s whole body seems to hitch, for a second.

“You’re Clint _Barton_?” he asks incredulously, and both Clint and Steve look at him with varying degrees of concern.

“Yes? Last I checked, anyway,” Clint says, and Steve can’t help but laugh again because coming from anyone else that would be a joke but coming from Clint it’s - not, somehow.

“Okay,” Bucky says. “Carry on.”

“No way, man, why’d you know my name? Did someone put out a hit on me again?” Clint asks, brow furrowed. He takes a sip of his coffee and raises his eyebrows. “That’s...surprisingly good. Huh.”

“No, it’s like, the opposite of a hit, don’t worry,” Bucky says.

“Someone hired a bodyguard for me?” Clint asks, and Steve sighs.

“The caramel’s good,” Bucky ventures, and Clint squints.

“Yeah,” he agrees eventually, still trying to stare Bucky down.

“I - know someone who knows you,” Bucky concedes eventually, after a few long moments of uncomfortable silence. “She asked me - not to kill you. If the situation ever arose.”

“What?” Clint asks, now possibly more alarmed than he had been when he thought someone had put out a hit on him. “Who?”

“Uh,” Bucky says. “Natalia Romanova? Red hair, about this high -” he indicates, and Clint’s eyes go wide.

“ _Natasha_?” he asks incredulously. “You - small fuckin’ world, how d’you know her?”

“We worked in the same organisation for a while,” Bucky says, and Clint, bless him, knows when not to push.

“Small fuckin’ world,” he repeats. “When did she - why -?”

“It was - a trust thing,” Bucky says. He looks supremely uncomfortable but soldiers on anyway, with a quick warning glance at Steve when Steve opens his mouth to assure Bucky he doesn’t have to elaborate of he doesn’t want to.

“Trust between spies is a rare thing,” Clint says sanctimoniously, either oblivious to the tension running through Bucky or doing a good job pretending.

“That’s why - I mean, she told me she didn’t work for HYDRA, that she was a mole, but - nobody would’ve believed her, straight off. So we - exchanged names,” Bucky says. His hands fidget against the rough wood of the table.

“That’s why she helped me escape,” Steve says. “When she heard my name -”

The three of them sit, for a while, digesting this. There are so many ways this could have turned out, if only a few things had been done a little differently.

“We should go help her,” Clint says, at the same time that Steve’s phone rings. “I’m still not over the Budapest thing.”

“Tony?” Steve asks, as he answer the phone.

“So Natasha just called me,” Tony says, and Steve raises his eyebrows.

“Speak of the devil,” he says, and Clint looks up in interest.

“She called you too?” Tony asks.

“No, no,” Steve says. The coffee shop is a busy place, and noisy enough that he thinks putting Tony on speaker should be safe. “We were just talking about her.”

“What did she say?” Clint asks.

“She wanted to cash in on her favour, didn’t she,” Bucky says, and his voice is unmistakeably fond.

“Well, yes, but I need to explain this,” Tony says. “So, her employe wants information on HYDRA, right? And the leader of HYDRA happens to send her to retrieve a ledger with information about HYDRA on it. But when she tries to give the disc to her employer, he rejects it. And then he doesn’t bring her in, because he’s an asshole.”

“So it’s not -?”

“It’s not a ledger,” Tony confirms. “Or, we think it’s not. But we need to open it and find out before she meets with the leader tomorrow.”

“You can’t open it?” Steve asks. Tony can open anything, or so he’s said.

“It’s - I could, but it would take a while,” Tony says. “A long long while, because this is a black box. It’s for the President’s eyes.”

The table descends into chaos, which is less actual chaos and more everyone looking around at each other in shock and a vague sort of horror at the prospect of the President somehow being involved in this. “What the fuck is HYDRA doing with that?” Clint asks finally, and the shrug from Tony is audible in the silence.

“I think we need Coulson for this,” Steve says. Coulson had worked with the President, during her days at SHIELD.

“Good plan,” Tony says. “Natasha wants Bucky to tell her what’s on the disc before two tomorrow. PM, that is. That’s when she meets with Schmidt.”

“Thanks, Tony,” Steve manages to say before Tony hangs up. He doesn’t even have to look up before calling Coulson.

“Coulson,” the voice on the other side of the line says crisply.

“Can you go secure?” Steve asks.

“Done,” Coulson says. “Keep it quick, what do you want? I’m still technically on the clock.”

“I have bad news,” Steve warns, first off. He can already feel himself slipping back into mission-report language. “The person I knew - he was a prisoner of a terrorist organisation. In getting him out, we obtained access to a hard drive that organisation possessed and found it to be a black box.”

For a moment, the silence across the line is deafening. “A black box,” Coulson says eventually.

“Yes,” Steve says.

“The President’s not in on this,” Coulson says a moment later, breaking the silence that’s settled around the table. “She can’t be.” They’d worked together for nearly fifteen years, Steve knows. Coulson sounds more shattered than Steve’s ever heard him at the suggestion that she’s somehow involved in this.

“That’s why we need you,” Steve says. “The contact we have in the organisation has to have over a disc by tomorrow. If we can confirm it’s not a ledger by then, she’ll hand over a blank disc.”

There’s another long silence, and then Coulson sighs. “Alright,” he says. “Alright. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll call you back.”

“I’m sorry,” is all Steve can think to say to Bucky, once Coulson has hung up. “I’m sorry. You should be - recovering, or something, seeing Becca, I don’t know, not - not this. I -”

“Steve, Stevie, it’s fine,” Bucky says, and Steve must look far more wretched about this than he wanted to let on, because Bucky is wide-eyed with worry and reaching out to grasp at Steve’s gesticulating hands. “It’ll be better to see Becca when I know nobody’ll be trying to track me there. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t want to, I promise. ”

“The same way I always felt fine when I was sick, I promise?” Steve asks, raising his eyebrows. Bucky grins at that, squeezes Steve’s hands a little.

“Maybe a bit,” he admits. “But I’d much rather be helping than sitting on my hands. I think it could be good for me, even. Staying active. Doing things to help you. Keep you safe.”

“Like you used to,” Steve says. He wants to make it a grumble, at least, but he can’t help the way it comes out around a smile.

“Like I used to,” Bucky agrees, soft. He ducks his head as he says it, and it’s possibly the best thing Steve has ever encountered.

~*~

LOCATION: THE WHITE HOUSE, 1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE  
WASHINGTON, DC

Despite the many times he’s been around it, or run past it during his stays at Washington, Steve’s missions tend to be low-profile enough that he’s never actually made his way inside the White House. For once, the clean interior of the place is something like he’d expected, as are the wary Secret Service agents who watch with narrowed eyes as Coulson leads Steve and Bucky down the numerous corridors with no sign of confusion.

As they draw near to the closed door of the Oval Office, Steve hears the low noises of an argument, and two figures exit the room. Unhappy frowns twist their faces and they glare as threateningly as they can. Coulson ignores them to push inside the door.

“Phil?” the President asks. Stacks of paper are piled on her desk, and the figures outside are clearly pacing unhappily, but she is the only one in the room. Coulson nods at Steve and, as per the plan, he starts to search for any bugs that may have been planted in the office.

“I’m sorry, Maria,” Coulson says, and sounds genuinely apologetic. President Hill’s sharp dark eyes watch Steve’s every move and Bucky’s stillness from where he’s planted himself just inside the doorway. When Steve stops searching, having determined that there are no bugs that he can find in the office, the President looks at him with something like approval in her eyes, and it sinks in properly for the first time that she was an agent too, once.

“What do you want?” she asks. “My bodyguards were not happy when I asked them to wait outside, especially,” she adds pointedly, “with this tale the CIA is putting out of you aiding unreliable civilians who turned down perfectly respectable desk jobs, or whatever.”

“That would be Steve, probably,” Coulson says, and Steve raises and awkward hand as both of them turn to look at him a little severely. “Steve Rogers. He was SHIELD, as you know. Codename Captain America.”

“SHIELD’s been shut down.”

“And I fully intend to take you to task for that someday,” Coulson says with a glare slight enough to be taken as gentle instead of accusing.

“I’ll let you,” President Hill says, sounding a little regretful. “It wasn’t what I wanted. But that’s not what you’re here for.”

“No,” Coulson confirms, “We’re here about a covert terrorist organisation with links to Brooklyn and the altercation last week in Sokovia.”

“Not the Prime Minister -”

“That exact one,” Coulson says.

“Don’t forget the real-life operative,” Bucky says, and it is only half a joke. Phil nods at him.

“Indeed,” he says. “James over there was an operative for them, though I feel I should mention his work with them was the result of coercion and not conversion.”

The President looks at Bucky without pity in her eyes, but when she says, “I’m sorry that happened,” it sounds real. Steve can see Bucky relax, and is very glad yet again that he voted for Maria Hill.

“To cut a long story short,” Coulson continues smoothly, “we found a mole who was willing to cut a deal with us. She’d been tasked with finding a ledger of operatives and gave us a copy of the information, but,” he hesitates, stumbles over his words for the first time, and the President doesn’t need to hear what he has to say to know it’s going to be bad. “The information needs your biometrics.”

The President just stares for a second, her face blank and body motionless. The shock is only visible in her eyes, and Steve finds himself believing it, believing her. From the way Coulson relaxes next to him, he’s come to the same conclusion, and for all that Steve knows Coulson wants to be convinced Steve still trusts his judgement.

“My biometrics,” President Hill says finally. “It - it has to be changed somehow, I’d never -”

“I know,” Coulson says, and takes a few impulsive steps forward to hug her. She returns it gladly, with enough force that Steve can hear Coulson wheeze slightly from where he’s still standing.

“We have word it might not be a ledger at all, actually,” Steve says, and Coulson nods when the President looks at him. “Ah, Iron Man got a call, and our mole said she tried to give the drive to her handler but he refused it, even though it’s definitely meant to be what he asked for.”

“And he’d have no reason to do that,” Coulson picks up, “unless -”

“It wasn’t a ledger and the handler knew,” President Hill says with narrowed eyes. “Who is this employer?”

“She doesn’t want to say unless she receives confirmation it’s not a ledger,” Steve says. “She wanted the biometrics to open it herself -”

“I can’t give her that,” President Hill says, and she looks regretful about it but her voice is firm.

“She knew that,” Bucky says. “She’ll accept my word. We worked together,” he elaborates, when the President looks at him inquisitively. “She trusts me.” Slowly, he steps forward and places the now-familiar drive on the President’s desk. Steve knows that it is no accident that he lets his sleeve slide upwards and expose the metal wrist behind the glove he’s wearing. President Hill looks at it, at him, and doesn’t react. It makes Bucky relax all the more when he backs away.

“Fine,” President Hill says. She looks to Coulson as she picks up the drive. “Phil? It’s safe?”

Coulson hesitates. “I know an agent I trust was the one to vouch for it,” he says. “But with the doubt over what it is - I don’t know that I’d be comfortable calling it safe.”

“That’s fine,” President Hill says. “Thank you.” The computer she brings out, in the wake of that exchange, is clearly something cheaper, probably disposable. Nevertheless, it works quickly, and it is not even a minute before she has the drive plugged in, the four of them gathered around to watch the screen.

FINGERPRINTS, the computer demands, and once that is given moves onto EYES, and then VOICE RECOGNITION PROMPT: HOSPITAL TEMPERATURE. It makes no sense to Steve, but from the way the President ducks her head downwards and Phil puts a hand on her shoulder to steady her, it makes sense to them.

“Negative forty-four degrees,” she says, and the computer screen flashes alarmingly a few times before a folder opens obligingly.

For a few long seconds, nobody speaks. The four of them, huddled around the laptop, can only watch the screen in incredulity, and after a long stretched-out moment of silence Bucky walks around to the other side of the desk, raising his phone to his ear.

“That’s not a ledger,” Phil says. It states the extremely obvious, but it is the only thing currently in Steve’s mind as well.

“Nat?” Bucky asks into his phone.

He must also have put it on speaker, because Steve can hear Natasha’s voice as she says, “Well?”

“It’s not a ledger,” Bucky says simply.

There are a few moments of silence, and then Steve hears an intake of breath and Natasha asks, “So what is it?” Her voice is a little fainter than it was, and Steve can’t help but be sorry that Bucky has to deliver news that is possibly the last thing Natasha wants to hear.

“I’m not sure we should -” Phil starts.

“We can trust her,” Bucky insists. His hand clenches hard enough around the phone that it would probably be white if there was still blood running through it, and the phone creaks a little threateningly.

“We can trust her,” Steve adds, when Phil still looks doubtful. Natasha has had enough things hidden from her.

“Fine,” President Hill says, with a curt nod.

“It’s money,” Bucky says. “A lot of money. Untraceable bank account numbers, anonymous funds.”

“How much?”

“A lot,” Bucky says. “Nearly - two billion? More?”

“More,” Coulson confirms. “Probably more than three billion.”

“Fuck,” Bucky breathes.

“Enough money for HYDRA to operate in peace for years,” Natasha says. It sounds like it’s meant to be a question but her voice is flat, makes it a statement.

“Easily,” Coulson confirms. President Hill puts her head in her hands, and then raises it, the movement sudden and sharp.

“Did she say HYDRA?” she asks, her voice as sharp as the motion of her head had been a moment ago.

“I said HYDRA,” Natasha confirms. Her voice is carefully blank.

“Who’s your handler?” President Hill asks in the direction of the phone.

There is a long silence on the other side of the phone, broken only by Natasha’s long, measured breathing. “Pierce,” she says finally. There is utter silence in the Oval Office, white walls silent and still as though in commiseration. The President and Coulson have both gone utterly pale. “Secretary of Defence Alexander Pierce,” Natasha says then, like they need the clarification.

“You’re sure?” the President asks. There is a quick, quiet breath from Natasha’s end, and Steve realises, abruptly, that she thought she would be dismissed. That Natasha had thought they would assume she was lying, and said the name anyway. Or, possibly, that she didn’t think her lie would be believed, but - he doesn’t think that of Natasha. Perhaps he should, but he doesn’t, and when he looks around he can see the others have drawn similar conclusions.

“Yes,” Natasha says. “I’m sure.”

“That fucking -” President Hill breaks off, takes a breath. “He approached me about HYDRA,” she says. “A hypothetical experiment, he said. More covert than SHIELD. An _exercise_.”

“And you -” Coulson says.

“I vetoed it,” President Hill says, her hands spread wide over her table. “Of course I vetoed it, how could I justify -”

“Justify what?” Natasha asks sharply, when President Hill pauses to take a breath and makes no move to continue speaking.

“He wanted to recruit KIA agents,” Maria says. Her voice is barely louder than a whisper. “Agents from all nations. Set up situations that would leave survivors missing in action and just - take them. SHIELD might be flawed in terms of its information system and transparency, but fuck, all of our agents signed up for their jobs. They could quit when they wanted to.”

“Why would he approach you with it?” Coulson asks.

“I don’t think he ever intended for you to say yes,” Natasha says. “Not considering the goals of HYDRA.”

“He wanted to throw you off the scent,” Bucky says. “Hide it in plain sight.” His voice is bitter, but he presses gently into Steve’s touch, curls into an embrace.

“And I mean, even if you had said yes, he’d have your support setting it up,” Steve says, and thinks of how hard it can be to access SHIELD information. “It wouldn’t’ve been hard to hide some of his personally motivated stuff.”

“Fuck,” President Hill says. The steady English oak of the Resolute desk lives up to its name, determinedly supports her elbows as she puts her face in shaking hands. “Fuck, I should’ve known -”

“It’s not your fault,” Bucky says, almost at the same time Natasha echoes the sentiment.

“You’re meeting with Schmidt today,” Steve says in the ensuing silence.

“Yes,” Natasha says. “In two hours.” There’s a brief hesitation, and then she adds, “I’ll wipe the drive. But I’ll blame it on you, so. Watch your back,” and with that, the line goes dead.

“Will she really wipe the drive?” President Hill asks.

“Yes,” Bucky says, without hesitation. And he knows her best, so Steve and Coulson both keep their mouths shut.

“All right,” President Hill says. She pinches the bridge of her nose once, fingertips white with the force of it before she looks up and meets Coulson’s eyes squarely. “I’ll look into the Pierce claim and so should you, if you get the chance. I don’t need to tell any of you to stay quiet about it.”

“No, Madam President,” Steve manages to get out when she transfers that hard sharp gaze towards him.

She smiles, a little manic and a lot tired. “Just call me Maria. I want you to get HYDRA out of my system.”

~*~

INTERLUDE  
LOCATION: MEMORY FIELD BURIAL GROUND  
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK

Whatever else he may or may not be, Johann Schmidt is a dramatic bastard. It is the only explanation Natasha can think of when she considers that he has set up their meeting in a cemetery, of all places. And this cemetery is not even in use, its plots all occupied; it is, in effect, a twice dead place.

Still, whether or not this is dramatic flair on Schmidt’s part is not quite the correct question: the true question is whether he has set up the meeting in this particular place because he finds the foreshadowing amusing. Natasha tries to keep away from macabre thoughts when she can, but it is impossible not to wonder, as she walks among the tombstones, whether she is coming out of this place.

Natasha does not make a habit of visiting graveyards, but she isn’t sure whether the total stillness around her is entirely natural. Not for the first time, she wonders why she is here. She could run; she has run before. She is _good_ at running. And yet, for some reason, she continues to put herself in danger by staying near a handler who is corrupt and an organisation who probably know she is a mole. She’d thought she could do good inside them, with a Secretary of Defence who’d approached her personally, and yet it is only more of the same.

The only thing stronger than the instinct for self-preservation is the one for revenge. The Red Room had been reduced to broken pieces and she is determined that HYDRA will follow.

When she next turns there is a bright blue Subaru at the end of the lane, jarringly brightly unnatural against the washed-out yellow leaves and brown dirt and grey stone graves that make up the rest of the environment around her. She does not flinch at the sight of it, and walks towards the waiting group.

Schmidt’s hands are folded in front of him and a gun in his pocket. There are three men behind him, two combat trained and standing ready, the other in a strategic position half-hidden by the car with a laptop set up in front of him.

He sighs as though in relief when Natasha hands him the drive. “All is forgiven,” he says, at the end of his breath.

Natasha takes a breath as he moves away to hand the drive away. When she releases the air from her lungs it is slow, and he sinks down and down and down, into a version of her who hasn’t seen the drive, who truly has been working for HYDRA all this time.

“That’s not a ledger, is it?” she asks.

“You didn’t take a look for yourself?” Schmidt asks. His ruddy skin glows positively red in the chilly wind.

“Of course I did,” Natasha says, because she would have and the answer is expected. She feels like she is on a tightrope, balancing between what is expected and what would be too much. “It was encrypted.”

“Why would I lie to you?” Schmidt asks, and sounds like he’s addressing a child.

“So I would pass it on,” Natasha answer, and relaxes slightly at the familiarity of this role, the question-answer between them, even as it indicates that she is not trusted; that she is being set up not only by Pierce but by Schmidt. “A secret is only safe when one person is holding it.”

“And you wouldn’t have helped me,” Schmidt says. Natasha blinks once, resists the urge to tense her muscles. _He knows_ , something in her mind shouts, but how much he knows remains a mystery.

“What is actually on the drive?” she asks, when nobody moves.

“I’ll be honest with you when you start being honest with me,” Schmidt says, and he sounds almost playful. It makes Natasha’s spine shudder, and alarms ring through her head. “We both know why you came back,” Schmidt continues, and Natasha wants to _bolt_. _He knows, he knows, he knows_. She stays still.

“You’re still alive,” Schmidt says, “because I believe in your potential. I’m growing impatient, Natalia. I know you are not being true to me, to HYDRA. Why do you continue to resist?”

He knows she is not entirely loyal. He has made no mention of other employers, so Natasha follows his lead. “If we’re being honest,” she says, voice hesitant, and then pushes her luck. She likes to think it is what she would do even if she was utterly clueless. “You’re a terrorist.”

The words land between them heavily despite the care she took to keep her voice soft. As she’d thought, Schmidt barely flinches at the label, has probably been called far worse by people far closer to him. “If that were true,” he starts carefully, “then my goal would be to spread fear. My method is far more…surgical. HYDRA creates _order_.”

“You kill innocent people. You recruit people against their will.”

Schmidt’s lips curl up, but it cannot in good conscience be labelled a smile. “I helped my governments kill many innocent people and more, so much more. But they were keeping things as they were. What I do now is to bring about change.”

She does not know whether these are empty words or whether he is truly trying to convince her. She does not particularly care. “I think Steve Rogers would disagree.”

“Steve Rogers may not call himself such, but he is a gambler,” Schmidt says, and he’d be convincingly dismissive if it wasn’t for the way his hand spasms, brief and angry, at the mention of Rogers. “And it is worse because he does not gamble with objects but with lives, his own and others. And one day his luck will run out, and thousands of innocent people will pay the price. Which one of us will be the villain then?”

Natasha drops her eyes to the ground for a moment, as would be expected, if she’d been hit very hard by an argument. She is saved from coming back with a response by the arrival of one of the bodyguards, who leans in close to Schmidt. Her lungs tighten, her heart beats like it wants to fly away.

He speaks in German when he says, “It’s empty,” but Natasha has made it her business to understand all the languages HYDRA uses between them.

Schmidt’s face remains calm but his face flushes hard as he turns to Natasha. His hand raises. For a moment Natasha is sure he is going to strike her, goes over the routes out of the graveyard, but then his hand lowers slowly. She leans back, turns her face away.

“I’m very interested,” Schmidt says, “to see who you blame for this.” She refuses to step back, and so his hand lands on her face, grip cruel on the line of her jaw.

“Apparently Rogers and his team didn’t trust me after all,” she says with a carefully bitter twist to her mouth. She meets Schmidt’s cold eyes squarely.

“Perhaps it makes him wise,” Schmidt says. His hand lowers, but it does not approach the pocket where he keeps his gun.

“Perhaps,” she acknowledges.

“Well then,” Schmidt says. “Since you have grown so very close to him, I want you to deliver a message.”

~*~

LOCATION: THE CHARCUTERIE CAFÉ & DINER  
QUEENS, NEW YORK

It should have occurred to Steve that a place as pretentiously named as The Charcuterie Café & Diner would be fairly crowded in the middle of the afternoon, and he has to wonder whether it was a good idea to agree to a meeting here, with so many people around. He vaguely trusts Natasha, and Bucky trusts her wholeheartedly, but neither of them are ready to go back into the field, they can both admit it.

“This life doesn’t wait for us to be ready,” Bucky had said, when he’d gotten the text message that’d only said _5pm tonight. the charcuterie in queens. trust me_.

“Relax, Cap,” Tony says unhelpfully into the comms, which is easy enough for him to say, he’s the one supervising the missions from the Tower, he’s not the one sitting on an uncomfortable unfriendly chair and waving away overly helpful waiters every five seconds and trying not to explode with impatience. Steve has never been overly good at waiting.

“Easy for you to say,” he bites out, even though it’s not exactly fair; Tony’s job is probably going to become a lot more difficult as time passes, and there’s a different kind of fear that comes with being physically removed from a mission situation.

“It’s not, actually,” Tony points out anyway, because he’s a dick like that.

“I know, I know,” Steve says, because if Tony goes on a roll it will mean very bad things for their collective patience and concentration. “I’m just tense, I’m sorry.”

“Which is why I said to _relax_ ,” Tony says, in a tone that is probably meant to be wildly persuasive. Clint hasn’t said anything yet, and Bucky only rolls his eyes, for which Steve is profoundly grateful, because he fucking knows that both of them are troublingly gifted at stirring the pot.

“Don’t move,” Steve hears Natasha say before he sees her. In the next moment he understands why, because she swings herself onto Bucky’s lap with a small knife positioned snugly against his neck. The way Natasha’s sitting on him makes it unnoticeable from behind, and the only people who do seem to notice are three guys loitering a few metres away who only watch in a way that makes it abundantly clear they are not going to move to help.

“Not moving,” Bucky says. Somehow his voice is calm, and he reaches over the table to tap gently at Steve’s knuckles. It’s only then that Steve realises he’s on the verge of breaking their table. “Don’t worry, Stevie.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Steve snaps. “What the fuck, Natasha?”

“It was this or kidnap him and strap a bomb to his chest,” Natasha says. “I’m meant to deliver the message that Schmidt wants his disc back.”

“Fuck Schmidt,” Steve snaps. He can’t seem to take his eyes off the knife on Bucky’s neck, fuck, it’d be so easy - and he can’t lost Bucky, not again - and Bucky’s just _sitting there_ -

“Breathe, Steve,” Bucky’s voice cuts through the panic in his head, and Steve tries his best to follow the advice. “I’m fine. I’m fine. Nat won’t hurt me.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Steve says.

“Left hand pocket,” Tony says.

“I know,” Steve snaps, and digs it out.

“It’s a fake, but you know that,” Bucky murmurs, as the disc slides across the table.

“It needs to be a good fake,” Natasha warns, not taking it.

“It is,” Steve says. “It’ll let them retrieve money, but everything goes through Tony,” Steve says. “It buys us time.”

“It’s a _very_ good fake,” Tony agrees smugly.

“It buys us time to do what?” Natasha asks warily.

“Nothing on your part, really,” Bucky assures her. “But the disc also has a - not a virus, it doesn’t have an effect, but it reads information.”

“You’re looking for an actual ledger,” Natasha says, eyes narrow.

“If we don’t find anything, we just publish what you gave us,” Steve says, “and we use that to take them down.”

“Pierce isn’t mentioned in what I gave you,” Natasha points out.

“That’s why we’re looking for more,” Bucky says. “If they kept records that detailed on one project, surely there are more on others.”

“Fine,” Natasha says, and draws the thumbdrive the rest of the way across the table to tuck into her shirt. “If they kill me because of this, I’m going to haunt your asses for the rest of your lives,” she says, and swings herself deftly into a standing position.

“Fucking bye,” Bucky says, face melting into a scowl as he pushes her away. The men on the waterfront look on calmly, expecting this. They do not catch the gentle way Bucky taps Natasha’s ankle under the table.

“Pleasure doing business,” Natasha says, and saunters off.

~*~

LOCATION: [REDACTED]  
IN A CAR, STAKING OUT SCHMIDT’S APPARENT SAFEHOUSE

“Natasha’s a _treasure_ ,” Tony half-yells from wherever he is in the Tower.

“What did she do?” Bucky asks, at the same time that Steve says, “What happened to Pepper?”

“She duplicated my program and sent it to Pierce,” Tony says. “And fuck you, Steve.”

“So we have enough -?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Tony says. “Undeniably. This is the best day of my life.”

It’s that moment that Steve’s phone rings, and when he picks up Natasha’s already shouting at him. “Release the information _now_ ,” she demands, as something suspiciously like gunfire pops in the background. “I blew my cover getting that thing onto Pierce’s laptop, you _better_ be getting something out of it.”

“We are getting _so much_ out of it,” Tony says gleefully.

“Tony says we’re getting _so much_ out of it,” Steve narrates, inflection and all.

Natasha sighs. Someone on her end yells, “If you do this, your _entire past is compromised_! You will _never be safe again_!”

“ _Fuck you_!” Natasha hollers right back, at a volume so loud that it makes Steve wince. “You should know _better_ than to try and trick someone who _took down an entire agency_ for doing the same thing!”

“I bet that feels good,” Bucky mutters, because apparently Natasha was loud enough to be heard from the passenger seat.

“Happen to know any safehouses in Queens?” Natasha asks, once the shouting has quietened down.

“There’s that one behind the shady secondhand place on Astoria,” Steve offers, and Natasha mutters out a thanks and hangs up.

“Okay, change of plan,” Tony says, “I’m releasing the information now, literally now, I just pressed the button, it’s flooding onto the internet and you guys are legal to break and enter in the name of justice and the American way, go, go, go.”

“But Pierce, we need -” Bucky starts. It’s strange hearing his voice in the car and in the comms, one just behind the other.

“I sent the information to the President, she’ll deal with him,” Tony says.

Up in the windows of the safehouse, lights turn off, and then come back on again. The curtains twitch as the inhabitants try to draw them tighter. Steve can see their silhouettes, a short portly man and a taller angular one moving restlessly.

“We don’t have our gear,” Steve complains helplessly as they get out of the car. “What the fuck happened to _routine stakeout_ , Tony?”

“I’m sorry, did you want me to leave Natasha to be hunted down by Pierce’s thugs?” Tony asks.

“I am never trusting you when you tell us to go light again,” Steve vows as he and Bucky position themselves near the door.

“Ready?” Bucky asks softly. It’s ridiculous, they have a missions and it’s somewhat time-sensitive, but Steve has to lean forward and squeeze his hands anyway, just for an instant.

“We’ll be fine,” he says, more to himself than Bucky, who seems convinced of that anyway. They looks at each other for another moment, and then Steve kicks the door open as quietly as he can, which really doesn’t say much. He doesn’t even need to open his mouth before Bucky moves past him, deceptively quiet for the speed he’s moving at.

Schmidt and Zola seem, at least, to be moderately on top of things; as the two of them rush up the stairs to the top of the building Steve can hear shouting, frantic movement, a lot of swearing. Then Bucky bursts through the door and throws himself at Zola, and the shouting flies upwards in pitch and intensity.

“Winter Soldier! _Report_!” Schmidt manages to yell, before Steve smacks him in the face with the nearest chair to shut him up. Schmidt survives the chair to the face, sadly, but he does stop shouting to focus on Steve.

“желание, ржaвый -” Zola starts as he backs up towards the nearest wall.

“Shut the _fuck_ up,” Bucky snarls, and lunges forward again, but Steve didn’t miss the way his body had hitched at the words and neither did Zola.

“Soldat, _report_ ,” Schmidt huffs out again, at the same time that Zola yells more Russian words and Bucky makes an inarticulate shrieking sound to block him out.

In the end, Zola’s body is not one made for fighting, and Bucky takes him down with solid kicks to the knee, the sternum, the throat; if he is slightly more violent than a technically nonthreatening target requires, Steve isn’t going to call him out. Steve has plausible deniability in the form of fighting Schmidt, who is surprisingly kind of terrible at fighting. Or maybe it’s not surprising - the man’s job had been to sit behind a desk and look intimidating, after all, and it’s probably been awhile since he’s been out in the field. Either way, he ends up on the floor after a kick dislocates his knees, and from there it’s easy enough to knock him out and cuff him.

“Bucky?” Steve asks, tentative. Bucky hasn’t moved from where he’s taken Zola down, and from what Steve can see he’s simply watching the small man’s chest move as he breathes. “Buck?”

He circles around Bucky as best he can, feet gentle against the wooden floor. “Hey,” he murmurs, and this time he does elicit a reaction, Bucky’s head snapping upwards, pale gaze sharp and blank. “Hey, Buck.”

“Steve,” Bucky breathes, and the wave of relief that crashes over Steve is so profound that it makes his knees weak. He straightens those knees, though, puts iron into them, because in the next moment Bucky is depending on them, leaning into Steve and murmuring, “Bring me back, bring me back, _Steve_ -”

“I got you,” Steve murmurs helplessly, hands stroking any part of Bucky they can reach. “I got you. What happened? Was it the words?”

“I - yes,” Bucky says. “Disassociation. Compliance. I - it hurts.” His voice is rough, face hidden in Steve’s neck.

“What can I do? You want me to talk, or not?” Steve asks, trying to keep his voice level and each option open. “You want to get out of here?”

“Talk,” Bucky says. “Please.”

“I - um, okay,” Steve says, utterly adrift but also utterly determined to make this work, somehow. “Your name’s James Buchanan Barnes, but everyone calls you Bucky, and you’re my best friend, and I love you.” Bucky seems to relax just at that, and Steve hopes desperately that he’s helping. “You have a sister called Becca, and we said we’d go see her, so you have to stick around for that. We met in primary school because Billy Bishop knocked down Amy Reinhardt’s sandcastle.”

“I remember that,” Bucky says with the ghost of a smile. “You were such a goddamn punk, jumping in like you did.”

“You were a fucking jerk, sending Billy off before I got any good hits in,” Steve says indignantly, and is treated to Bucky laughing, actually laughing, quiet and soft but undeniably real.

“So, not to intrude,” Tony says, unusually quietly, into his comms. Despite the low volume and purposeful gentleness in his voice, Steve and Bucky both jump at it. “But I sent Happy along with the car, so just dump your guys in there and he’ll deal with them.”

“Poor Happy,” Steve says, at the same time that Bucky says, “That sounds a lot more sinister than it should.”

“I’m secretly a criminal mastermind,” Tony says, and then, “Wow, that hits way too close to home now. Good to know, I guess.”

“Keep talking?” Bucky asks, and adds, “Both of you. Tell me about Steve while I was gone,” as he starts manhandling the two unconscious bodies on the ground.

It probably shouldn’t feel as good as it does, to stand below a slowly darkening sky with an arm around Bucky while Happy drives Schmidt and Zola away. Or maybe it should; Steve isn’t the best at evaluating his own emotional reactions to things.

“I was thinking of resigning,” Steve says, out of the blue. The evening air is cold against his skin. “I mean, it’s not like - I have a place to work anymore, but I kind of assumed SHIELD would be reformed and I’d join them. But I feel like - a break, after this.”

“A break sounds like it’d be good for you,” Bucky says, soft. “I never wanted - I think it’d be good for you.”

“I did mean what I said when I resigned, about clean energy,” Tony says. “Get your asses back to the Tower, I’m going to check on Bruce.” It’s not the most subtle of exits, but Steve’s grateful for it in any case.

Bucky seems to be, as well, if the way that he starts talking is any indication. “You used to be so - not gentle. But idealistic,” he says, and leans his body into Steve’s in a way he wouldn’t’ve been able to do, before. “This life isn’t a good one for you.”

“Or you,” Steve says, and Bucky acknowledges it with a tip of his head. There’s a long silence between them, and it’s bizarre to be walking down a dusk-lit alley way holding hands after recently arresting some of the lead members of a terrorist group but that’s what Steve’s doing.

“We could visit Becca soon,” he says, because now seems like a good time for suggestions, and Bucky smiles up at him.

“We should,” he agrees. The world seems to open up around them, and they keep walking.


End file.
